Right on cue, the U.S. FDA authorized bivalent COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc.-Biontech SE to be given as boosters at least two months following a primary vaccine series or a previous booster. “These updated boosters present us with an opportunity to get ahead of the next wave of COVID-19,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said, following the Aug. 31 announcement.
It’s not always obvious whether a claim found in a patent is obvious to a “person having ordinary skill” while the patent is still in prosecution, but that lack of clarity came back to bite Best Medical International Inc., of Springfield, Va. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that a patent for conformal radiotherapy held by Best included three claims that would have been obvious to this mythical person of ordinary skill, handing a win to Stockholm-based Elekta AB, maker of the Gamma Knife radiotherapy system.
For the first time since they’ve had access to U.S. capital, biopharma and med-tech companies based in China and Hong Kong are having to comply with the same accountability standards companies in the U.S. and other countries must follow as a condition of trading on U.S. markets.
If the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. vs. Glaxosmithkline LLC, it could be one of the biggest biopharma cases on the court’s calendar in the coming year. But that’s still an if. Whether the patent infringement case involving a so-called “skinny label” makes it to the high court’s docket depends on which interpretation of the underlying question the court accepts.
The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc. has joined forces with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to screen pathogens, toxins and diseases using its high-throughput organ-chip devices. As part of a concerted effort to develop new medical countermeasures against biological and chemical threats, organs-on-a-chip provide directly applicable insights into human responses and enable testing on organs developed from a diverse pool of live donors prior to human trials.
Integra Lifesciences Holdings Corp., of Plainsboro, N.J., said in its latest 8K filing that it has decided to voluntarily remove all the company’s Cerelink systems – which are indicated for intracranial pressure monitoring – due to customer reports that these monitors were returning inaccurate pressure readings.
Litigation over how to assign royalties for intellectual property with an offshore subsidiary doesn’t consume the kind of billable attorney hours that patent disputes do, but the question can affect a multinational corporation’s bottom line in significant ways. The U.S. Tax Court recently decided on a method for assigning royalties to a Medtronic plc subsidiary located in Puerto Rico that fell between the rate sought by Medtronic and the rate sought by an appeals court, but that ultimate rate was close to that preferred by Medtronic, handing the company a better outcome than it might have predicted when the IRS filed suit.
A dozen years after the Dodd-Frank Act was signed into U.S. law, the SEC adopted a final rule Aug. 25 implementing the law’s so-called “pay-vs.-performance” provisions related to executive compensation.
It’s that time of year when the U.S. Trade Representative asks for help as it prepares its list of notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy. While it’s not exhaustive, the annual list is composed of online and physical markets around the world that deal in commercial-scale counterfeiting and piracy across all sectors, including biopharma and med tech.