Medical Device Patent Litigation

Today the Federal Circuit vacated a claim contruction on an “introducer” patent which Pressure Products Medical Supplies had asserted against Enpath in the Eastern District of Texas, remanding the case to the district court.  See the decision in Pressure Products Medical Supplies v. Greatbatch (d/b/a Enpath) below.

Pressure Products is the exclusive licensee of U.S. Patent No. 5,125,904 covering a medical device known as an “introducer” — a device facilitating the placement of catheters or leads into blood vessels during surgical procedures.  The ’904 patent essentially claimed a more convenient way to remove the introducer’s valve and sheath after introduction of the lead.  Pressure Products sued Enpath in the Eastern District of Texas, accusing Enpath’s FlowGuard™ introducer product (“FlowGuard™”) and its ViaSeal™ prototype introducer product (“ViaSeal™”) of patent infringement.  In 2006, a jury found that Enpath’s FlowGuard™ and ViaSeal™ introducers literally infringed and awarded $1.1 million in damages.

Today, however, the Federal Circuit vacated the claim construction on which infringement of the ’904 patent was based.  The district court erroneously construed “means plus function” claim language (concerning the meaning of a claimed “score line”) to include subject matter that was not disclosed in the specification but only, if at all, in the prior art.  The Federal Circuit said:

“[T]he trial court impermissibly expanded the corresponding structure of claim 1 to include structures not described in the specification. … Trial courts cannot look to the prior art, identified by nothing more than its title and citation in a patent, to provide corresponding structure for a means-plus-function limitation. In this case, these references provide alternatives to scoring. …  Simply mentioning prior art references in a patent does not suffice as a specification description to give the patentee outright claim to all of the structures disclosed in those references.”