Facts

U.S. Patent No. 7,446,190 for cancer immunotherapy was issued to Plaintiff Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in 2008. Plaintiff Juno Therapeutics, Inc. licensed U.S. Patent No. 7,446,190 for cancer immunotherapy from Plaintiff Sloan in 2013. In 2017, Defendant, Kite Pharma, Inc., received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for the immunotherapy lymphoma treatment YESCARTA, and Plaintiffs sued Defendant shortly after this FDA approval for allegedly infringing on U.S. Patent No. 7,446,190.

PLAINTIFFS' CONTENTIONS: Plaintiffs contended that Defendant willfully infringed on its patent for cancer immunotherapy.

DEFENDANT'S CONTENTIONS: Defendant contended that Plaintiff Sloan Kettering's 2013 certificate of correction should be found invalid because the presence of a clerical or typographical error in the issued patent regarding a claimed DNA sequence encoding an amino acid sequence, or how to correct that error, was not clearly evident to one skilled in the art. Defendant further contended that if the certificate of correction were found invalid and the scope of the patent was limited to its scope as originally issued, Yescarta did not infringe the patent. Defendant also contended that the patent in question was invalid because it lacked an adequate written description of the invention and did not enable a person skilled in the art to practice the full scope of the claims without undue experimentation. Defendant also denied that it willfully infringed the patent.

Result

The jury awarded Plaintiffs a $725 million verdict.