Insights

Brussels – April 13, 2022:  The Legal 500 Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) 2022 edition has recognized 11 practice areas and seven lawyers in Crowell & Moring’s Brussels office. The seven individual lawyers received 12 total rankings across all practice areas. The publication seeks to “highlight the practice area teams who are providing the most cutting edge and innovative advice to corporate counsel.”

New York – January 27, 2022: Crowell & Moring secured a significant victory - a preliminary injunction against patent infringement through trial - on behalf of Lonza Walkersville, Inc., against Adva Biotechnology Ltd. in a case involving point-of-care cell-therapy technology.

Brussels – April 16, 2021: The Legal 500 Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) 2021 edition has recognized 11 practice areas and seven lawyers in Crowell & Moring’s Brussels office. The seven individual lawyers received 11 total rankings across all practice areas. The publication seeks to “highlight the practice area teams who are providing the most cutting edge and innovative advice to corporate counsel.”

Pharmaceutical innovators typically seek broad patent protection for their discoveries in order to prevent others from exploiting not only the specific embodiments the innovator wishes to pursue commercially, but also functional equivalents. But what happens when the additional functional equivalents that the innovator seeks to protect are not expressly disclosed in the patent? The Supreme Court recently addressed this issue in Amgen v. Sanofi.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2017 sea change venue decision in TC Heartland v. Kraft Food Group Brands, the Northern District of West Virginia has seen an uptick in substantive Hatch-Waxman litigation involving local pharmaceutical company, Viatris Inc. (formerly known as Mylan Pharmaceuticals). Viatris is frequently named as a defendant in Hatch-Waxman litigations, each of which is triggered by Viatris’s service of a statutorily-required notice letter stating why the patents that allegedly cover the brand name drug are invalid and/or not infringed by a proposed generic drug. Hatch-Waxman litigants have battled over the requirements for these notice letters in other courts. In Bausch Health Ireland Ltd. et al. v. Mylan Pharms. Inc., the Northern District of West Virginia has now added to that body of law, adopting a holding consistent with other courts that a generic drug company is not foreclosed from asserting additional defenses in litigation even if those defenses were not raised in the generic drug company’s notice letter. See No. 1:22CV20, 2023 WL 2726432, at *3 (N.D.W. Va. Mar. 30, 2023).