A Venable trial team led by Jared Stringham and Christopher Loh scored a patent victory on behalf of Novartis in the Northern District of West Virginia. Following a three-day bench trial starting in late February, Chief Judge Thomas Kleeh on July 6 issued a decision holding that Mylan’s generic versions of Novartis’s blockbuster heart failure drug, Entresto, would infringe Novartis’s U.S. Patent Nos. 8,877,938 and 9,388,134, which claim a crystalline complex of the active ingredients sacubitril and valsartan. Despite the technical complexity of the case, Judge Kleeh’s 114-page decision concluded that Novartis had shown by a preponderance of the evidence that Mylan’s generic products contain the claimed crystalline complex.
The trial team also included Nicholas Kallas, Christina Schwarz, Greg Manas, Alex McJoynt, Erin Belfield, Carrie Park, Launa Willingham, Jessica Boriello, and Lauren Grant.