The patent relates to a bipolar electrosurgical shearing instrument used to seal and cut blood vessels or vascular tissue, designed to use “both mechanical clamping action and electrical energy to coagulate, cauterize and/or seal tissue,” according to court documents.
The Board ruled in an inter partes review that Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon subsidiary showed that, through combinations of earlier inventions and publications, the invention would have been obvious.
“We determine that Petitioner has met its burden of proving the unpatentability of claims 1-13 of the ‘536 patent by a preponderance of evidence,” board judges wrote.
The decision is the most recent in a long-running patent infringement war between Covidien and Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon Endo-Surgery unit over surgical shears, which appeared to be over last month after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case.
Covidien in August asked the Supremes to hear its appeal of a December 2014 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which overturned a $177 million award to Covidien in the U.S. District Court for Connecticut. There, Judge Janet Bond Arterton had ruled that Ethicon Endo-Surgery infringed surgical shears patents held by Covidien’s corporate predecessors, Tyco Healthcare and U.S. Surgical Corp.
The Federal Circuit vacated the damages award, ruling that an Ethicon prototype anticipated the Covidien devices “because Ethicon conceived of the prototype before Tyco’s January 1997 conception date and diligently reduced it to practice without abandoning, suppressing, or concealing it thereafter,” Chief Judge Sharon Prost wrote for the 3-judge appeals panel. “The district court improperly held that the Ethicon prototype could not be considered prior art … and erred in finding that the curved blade claims and dual [cam] claims would not have been obvious.”
The high court’s decision, in which Justice Samuel Alito did not take part, means the Federal Circuit decision stands.
The companies agreed earlier in November to bury most of the hatchet, agreeing to drop the case with each side bearing its own legal costs, except for the then-pending Supreme Court bid.
The post PTAB tosses out Covidien patent in surgical shears spat with J&J’s Ethicon appeared first on MassDevice.
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