BioCentury
ARTICLE | Company News

Gilead, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Merck infectious news

June 13, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

A federal judge reversed a March jury decision that upheld two HCV patents and awarded $200 million in damages to Merck and Ionis from Gilead. In her decision, Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California wrote that “egregious misconduct” by a Merck attorney made the patents unenforceable. The judge found that an attorney responsible for prosecuting U.S. Patents Nos. 7,105,499 and 8,481,712, which list Merck and Ionis as assignees, was included in licensing discussions that disclosed the structure of compounds from Pharmasset Inc., which Gilead later acquired. According to Freeman’s decision, the attorney incorporated information from those discussions into the patents and then fabricated testimony concerning the discussions during a deposition and at trial. Merck said it plans to appeal the decision and that its advances in HCV therapies “required many years of research and significant investment by Merck and its partners.” ...