Feud reignited over Boston Scientific stent
WASHINGTON - Johnson & Johnson’s Cordis unit has again sued Boston Scientific Corp., claiming its Promus drug-coated stent wrongfully uses three of Cordis’s patents without permission.
J&J, the world’s largest health products company, asked for an order barring Boston Scientific’s infringement and for unspecified damages, in a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in Wilmington, Del. The Promus competes with J&J’s Cypher stent.
Boston Scientific’s “infringing sales have reduced Cordis’s Cypher stent sales and caused irreparable harm to Cordis,’’ J&J said in the lawsuit.
Boston Scientific said it will vigorously defend itself.
“We dispute these allegations and believe they are without merit,’’ spokesman Paul Donovan said.
Boston Scientific agreed in September to pay $716.3 million to Cordis to end some litigation over heart devices. That accord ended more than a dozen lawsuits between the two companies.
Boston Scientific, based in Natick, and J&J, based in New Brunswick, N.J., have been suing each other since 1997 over technology related to cardiac stents, tiny mesh tubes used to prop open heart arteries that have been cleared of fat.
For more than a decade, the two firms, top makers of the devices, have each claimed that the other is using proprietary technology for the basic structure of the products, the drugs that coat them to prevent the growth of scar tissue, or the systems used to put them in the arteries.
The companies will face each other in court next month for a hearing on damages after an appeals court said last year that Boston Scientific infringed two patents owned by J&J’s Cordis, while Cordis violated a patent owned by Boston Scientific. The trial is scheduled to start Feb. 1 in Wilmington.
