Assignment 4, Blog Post 2: Battle between St. Jude Medical and Volcano Corporation

St. Jude Medical and Volcano Corporation have been fighting a legal battle over patents related to pressure wire technology in cardiac care. The argument started when St. Jude Medical sued Volcano in the Delaware district court for infringing five St. Jude patents on pressure guide wires, which are long, thin, and flexible wires used by cardiologists to insert into a patient's blood vessel during surgery, such as angioplasty. Angioplasty is basically a surgical procedure used when a patient's blood vessel gets clogged with plaque. A balloon is used to swish the plaque to the sides and a stent is placed to keep the plaque from blocking the blood flow. The pressure wires use a microscopic pressure-sensing chip that is used to measure fractional flow reserve, and thus allowing a cardiologist to determine how severe the blockage in the artery is.

Then Volcano counterclaimed and said that St. Jude had infringed four of its patents. Volcano later dropped one of the four patents from the lawsuit. On October 19th, 2012 the jury decided that Volcano did not infringe two of St. Jude Medical's patents and that the other two patents were invalid.

On October 25, 2012, in response to Volcano's counter claims, a jury of eight ruled in favor of St. Jude, saying that Volcano had not shown infringement of its patents.

After reading this article (as well as the Nova article listed below), I want to look into what factors made some of the patent infringement claims invalid I also want to learn more about the process of making a counterclaim as well as  reaching a cross licensing or royalty agreement. It would also be good to look at the original patents and trying to dissect them myself.

URL: http://lifesciencesnow.com/patent-war-between-st-jude-medical-and-volcano-has-mixed-results/