Cited from NewYork Times. A unit of Johnson & Johnson said Monday that a jury has ordered Abbott Laboratories to pay $1.67 billion in a patent infringement suit over rheumatoid arthritis drugs.
Abbott’s best-selling drug, Humira, competes with the drug Remicade, an arthritis treatment made by the Centocor unit of Johnson & Johnson. That company and New York University filed a federal patent infringement suit against Abbott in April 2007 in the Eastern District of Texas.
The product belongs to a class of drugs known as anti-TNF, which block tumor necrosis factor proteins in the blood. When present in excessive amounts, TNF can cause inflammation.
“We are particularly gratified that the jury recognized our valuable intellectual property, finding our patent both valid and infringed,” Kim Taylor, president of Centocor Ortho Biotech, said in a statement. Humira has been a major success for Abbott, which has been approved for uses psoriasis and Crohn’s disease. Abbott had $4.5 billion in Humira sales in 2008.
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[...] The first problem we’ll analyze comes down to two things: drugs and money. No, this isn’t about the proliferation of bleach-huffing and coke dealing among quantum physicists. It’s about the way universities make money off of life science faculty. Namely, by starting new companies around promising compounds (potential pharmaceuticals) and licensing their technologies to those companies. In 2007, for example, New York University made $650 million off of just one drug — Remicade. It’s a big money business, and can even involve universities in major pharmaceutical disputes. [...]