MARTINSRIED and MUNICH, Germany, June 21 /PRNewswire/ -- The Munich-based biotechnology company MorphoSys AG (Neuer Markt: MOR) confirmed that Cambridge Antibody Technology Ltd. (CAT), together with The Medical Research Council and The Scripps Research Institute, initiated a lawsuit at the United States District Court for the Southern District of California in San Diego alleging infringement of their ``Winter II'' US patent. The Winter II patent covers certain antibody expression libraries and methods of generating such libraries and was granted in the USA on June 19, 2001 (U.S. Patent No. 6,248,516).
In Europe, a related Winter II patent was granted in 1994 and MorphoSys successfully opposed it at the European Patent Office (EPO) in October 1999. In its decision in 1999, the EPO requested substantial changes in the language of the key claim in the patent, thereby significantly narrowing the scope of protection.
This new lawsuit is based on a different patent than is involved in the pending suit in the United States District Court in Washington D.C., which is based on CAT's U.S. Patent No. 5,885,793 (``Griffiths'' patent). In that case, CAT failed to obtain an infringement verdict from the jury. There are several post-trial motions pending... |
