Argentum Pharmaceuticals recently announced that it, along with its manufacturing partner KVK Tech, has been granted a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against all challenged claims of the sole patent that covers Alcon’s PAZEO by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO).
PAZEO is currently in the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration’s (FDA) Orange Book.
With the petition, Argentum and KVK are challenging claims 1-4, 8, 12, 13, 21 and 22 of the patent submitted by Alcon, U.S. Patent No. 8,791,154. The PTO came to a decision on July 18 that there is a "reasonable likelihood that [petitioner] would prevail in showing that the claims it challenges are unpatentable.”
With the decision, three specialist patent judges will conduct an IPR trial within the PTO’s Patent Trial & Appeal Board (PTAB) with the final IPR patentability decision due within a year. This is the first time that the PTAB has instituted an IPR against this patent.
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