MARSHALL, Texas - A federal jury in Texas on Friday ordered Johnson & Johnson and a subsidiary to pay $482 million in damages to an inventor who claimed the health care giant infringed on his patent for a cardiac stent.
Jurors hearing the case in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas deliberated for two hours before returning the verdict against Johnson & Johnson and Cordis Corp.
Heart stents are mesh-wire tubes that prop open coronary arteries after surgery to remove fatty plaque. The dispute centred over Cordis' Cypher drug-eluting stents, which release a drug to help keep arteries from becoming blocked.
Bruce Saffran, a doctor from Princeton, N.J., sued the two companies in 2007, claiming the Cypher stents infringed on his 1997 patent covering technology to deliver injury-healing medication inside the body.
Jurors concluded that Saffran proved that the Cypher stents infringed on his patent and that Johnson & Johnson and Cordis did so wilfully — opening the door for the court to potentially triple the amount of damages.
Officials at Johnson & Johnson, which is based in New Brunswick, N.J., weren't immediately available to comment late Friday.
In 2008, another federal jury in Marshall awarded Saffran a $431.9 million patent infringement judgment against Boston Scientific Corp. U.S. District Judge T. John Ward later raised the amount to $501 million.
The company agreed in 2009 to pay $50 million to settle the dispute.
"We are gratified that a second jury has found that Dr. Saffran's patent was valid and wilfully infringed and that it constituted a significant medical advancement allowing the development of the drug-eluting cardiac stent, as recognized by the $482 million verdict," said Paul Taskier, a member of Saffran's legal team.
