IPR & Legal

The UK, on the basis of a democratic decision, can unilaterally revoke a decision to withdraw from the EU as long as the withdrawal agreement has not entered into force, the Court of Justice of the European Union, announced on 10 December.

ViiV Healthcare Ltd, the specialist HIV company majority-owned by GlaxoSmithKline Plc, has filed a patent infringement suit against Gilead Sciences Inc over bictegravir, an integrase inhibitor that is part of a combination therapy approved in the US on 7 February.

The US law firm, Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, has filed a class action suit against Sanofi SA, Novo Nordisk A/S and Eli Lilly and Company alleging that they have used increasingly wider discounts from the list price of their analogue insulins to gain favour with pharmacy benefit managers and health insurers and thereby gained market share.

Four companies with rights to intellectual property (IP) generated by Emmanuelle Charpentier and colleagues for the gene editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 have reached an agreement under which rights to the technology given by one member of the group will mean consent from the others.

The European Medicines Agency has appealed against a court order preventing it from releasing documents relating to two marketed medicines, arguing that the disclosures are consistent with its policy on transparency.

In a decision on 8 September, the General Court of the European Union has upheld €150 million of fines imposed by the European Commission on H. Lundbeck A/S and four generic companies for what it says were infringements of competition law.

Merus BV of the Netherlands has secured another legal victory over Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc in a battle over intellectual property rights to transgenic mouse technology for the production of therapeutic antibodies.

Merus BV has successfully fought off a patent infringement lawsuit brought against it in the US by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc, thus securing freedom to operate in the space for transgenic-mouse based antibody therapeutics. The Dutch company announced the decision on 5 January 2015.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has issued a decision in a patent case brought by a US corporation which gives a fresh interpretation to restrictions laid down in 2011 on the patentability of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes.