Court Upholds Abbott Protein Patent in Decades-Long Yeda Lawsuit

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the validity of Abbott’s protein-binding patent, handing yet another victory to the company in a decades-long dispute with Yeda Research and Development.

The Federal Circuit ruled that Abbott was the first to secure a patent for a tumor necrosis factor protein, citing a 1989 application filed by the company for a German patent. The decision upholds a district judge’s ruling from 2015 that granted Abbott inventorship of the patent for the protein used in autoimmune therapies.

Yeda contended that Abbott was not the inventor of the protein, referred to as TBP-II, because the 1989 filing for the patent was incomplete and failed to disclose the entire amino acid sequence for the protein.