Insights

New York – May 16, 2023: A three-person intellectual property team joins Crowell & Moring in New York, bringing in-depth IP litigation experience in patent and trade secret matters.

On May 13, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court judgment of no infringement in Actelion Pharmaceuticals Ltd. v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc., No. 24-1641. The decision offers important guidance for patent holders and generic manufacturers on the role of industry standards in interpreting scientific terminology during claim construction, prosecution history estoppel, and the disclosure-dedication rule.

In Constellation Designs, LLC v. LG Electronics Inc., No. 2024-1822 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 28, 2026), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit distinguished between two sets of claims under a Section 101 analysis, invalidating one set as result-oriented “optimization” claims that did not recite how to achieve such optimization, but upholding the other set as patent-eligible for reciting specific configurations with defined parameters. The court also confirmed that patentees may prove infringement by combining standards-based and product-specific evidence on a limitation-by-limitation basis.

The Federal Circuit recently denied a petition for rehearing en banc in the much watched In re Cellect matter.  The landmark panel decision determined how obviousness-type double patenting (“ODP”) is impacted when patent term adjustment (“PTA”) is added to the term of one or more patents in a family under 35 U.S.C. § 154(b), resulting in different terms for the family member patents that would otherwise expire on the same day.