Recently, a divided three judge panel sorting out a multi-party Hatch-Waxman suit, ruled that the patentee, Shinonogi, had not committed inequitable conduct in obtaining the patent that was subsequently reissued so as to obtain narrow claims focused on Rosuvastatin, or Crestor®, the popular cholesterol lowering drug. The majority of the panel also held that the patent was properly reissued due to error without deceptive intent. Although the deceptive intent element has been removed from the reissue statute by the AIA, it will remain relevant to earlier-filed reissues for some time to come. The opinion was subtitled AstraZenca UK Ltd v. Aurobindo Pharma Ltd, 2010-1460 to 1473 (Fed. Cir., December 14, 2012) and involved multiple “generic company” defendants. (A download is available at the end of this post.)

After finding the Crestor claim non-obvious over a Sandoz reference that disclosed a sulfonylated analog, the panel spent 7 pages discussing IC and 10 pages discussing whether or not the reissue application was properly filed. In terms of IC, Fed. Cir. panels continue to be reluctant to find IC in cases in which multiple parties create “a string of mishaps, mistakes, misapprehensions and misjudgment,” particularly if the “purported culprits” are “inexperienced and overworked,” to use the language of the district court, that also found no IC. It probably helped that the only two “purported culprits” were both Japanese patent attorneys apparently working in Japan, although it is hard to fathom how they carried out the prosecution of a U.S pharma application and then reissued the resulting patent with no input from U.S. counsel, but none are mentioned. The Japanese attorneys had failed to file an IDS during prosecution of the ‘440 patent, and then filed for reissue, listing the two references on an IDS, and obtained the ‘314 reissued patent with claims essentially limited to Crestor.

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