PTAB Grants Inter Partes Review for Narcan Spray Patent

The U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has decided to conduct an inter partes review of Opiant Pharmaceutical’s patent covering its opioid-overdose treatment Narcan (naloxone).

The patent’s challenger, Nalox-1 Pharmaceuticals, claims that Opiant’s patent (9,211,253) for the nasal spray version of the drug is invalid because it is common knowledge available to anyone experienced in solutions-based drug development. PTAB agreed that this argument would likely prevail. 

The board threw out several parallel challenges filed by Nalox-1 to avoid redundancy. PTAB asked the parties to rank the challenges in order of importance and they chose this Nalox-1 claim for review.