In a statement, Boston Scientific said it believed the jury's verdict is unsupported by both the evidence and the law. As a result, the company said it would seek to overturn the verdict in post-trial motions and, if unsuccessful, appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
"We do not intend to record a charge at this time because we believe we will prevail on appeal," said company spokesman Paul Donovan.
Barbara Wrigley, a patent attorney with Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly in Minneapolis who was not involved with the case, said the jury award easily stands as one of the 10 largest ever in the U.S. An appeal likely would take about two years, Wrigley estimated, and the matter could drag on even longer if the case is then sent back to the lower court for reconsideration.
"It's not unusual for an individual inventor to win an award like this," Wrigley said, adding a jury's perception is of a David-like underdog going up against a Goliath-like
corporation.
Stents are metal mesh tubes used to prop open heart arteries, and the Taxus stent has generated billions in sales for Boston Scientific's stent division in Maple Grove. The stent is coated with drugs that prevent arteries from re-clogging - a development that helped make stents blockbuster products in 2003 and 2004.
Gary Hoffman, an attorney who represented Saffran, said his client came up with the essential concept behind drug coated-stents while completing his residency at a hospital in Boston. Saffran worked at home with makeshift materials in coming up with the idea for placing a layer of material on devices that could "directionally deliver a drug to damaged tissue," Hoffman said.
Saffran applied for a patent in 1995 and received it two years later, said Hoffman, who is with Dickstein Shapiro in Washington, D.C. It is valid, he said, until 2013. The inventor also has a lawsuit against New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson, which has dominated the drug-coated stent market along with Boston Scientific.
"Dr. Saffran is an independent inventor, and his contributions to the advancement of medical technology needed to be recognized and rewarded," Hoffman said.
Saffran still is considering whether to seek an injunction against the sale of the Taxus products, Hoffman said.
Johnson & Johnson won such an injunction last year in a separate patent case involving a Medtronic spinal product, which Fridley-based Medtronic had to remove from the market.
To Larry Kurland, a partner in the intellectual property group with the St. Louis-based law firm Bryan Cave, said the award speaks volumes about the attitude of juries in the eastern district of Texas like the one that heard the case. That district, lawyers say, has a reputation for being plaintiff-friendly.
"They tend to believe if you've got a patent ... you must have done something that makes you entitled to something," Kurland said.
