On Tuesday, March 2, 2021, Williams & Connolly obtained a trial victory on behalf of AstraZeneca in a high-stakes Hatch-Waxman patent litigation against Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. involving three patents covering AZ’s blockbuster Symbicort product, an inhaler treatment for asthma.  The decision followed an October 2020 bench trial conducted entirely remotely via Zoom. 

During trial before the U.S. District Court for the District of West Virginia, where Mylan is headquartered, Mylan argued that all of the asserted patents  were obvious based on prior inhaler formulations.  The court rejected that argument and concluded that the patents were not obvious given the large number of possible formulations known at the time of the invention, and because AstraZeneca’s claimed formulation had unexpectedly superior properties to similar formulations that had failed in the past.

This was only the second patent infringement trial in West Virginia federal court since the Supreme Court’s decision in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods Group, which narrowed the choice of venue in patent infringement cases for domestic corporations. 

AstraZeneca was represented by Williams & Connolly attorneys David Berl, Jessica Rydstrom, Jessica Ryen, and Kevin Hoagland-Hanson.

Click here to read Law360’s coverage of the case.