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(Reuters) – U.S. biotech Gilead Sciences Inc (NASDAQ:GILD) escaped a $1.2 billion penalty after a U.S. appeals court on Thursday found that relevant parts of a patent on a cancer therapy owned by a Bristol Myers (NYSE:BMY) Squibb unit that were the basis for a previous ruling and fine were invalid.
The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit threw out the verdict in a case involving accusations that Yescarta, the CAR-T cell cancer immunotherapy from Gilead’s Kite Pharma unit, infringed on patents for a similar therapy from Bristol’s Juno Therapeutics.
Last year, a federal judge increased the damages that Gilead would pay to Bristol Myers Squibb to $1.2 billion in the patent infringement case.
Gilead and Kite’s attorney Josh Rosenkranz of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the attorney for Bristol Myers and Juno, Morgan Chu of Irell & Manella.
A jury in 2019 found that Kite willfully infringed and awarded Juno and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, which licenses the patent to Juno, $778 million. U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez increased the award to $1.2 billion in Los Angeles federal court.
Memorial Sloan Kettering did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel that the relevant parts of Juno’s patent were invalid because they lacked a sufficient written description and details.
Moore was joined by Circuit Judges Sharon Prost and Kathleen O’Malley in the ruling.
During a July oral argument https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/fed-circ-probes-validity-cancer-treatment-patent-12-bln-win-2021-07-06, Moore compared the patent’s description to trying to identify a specific car by saying it has four wheels.
