Boston Scientific ordered by judge to pay N.J. doctor

Boston Scientific Corp., the world’s second-largest maker of heart devices, was ordered to pay $431 million to a New Jersey doctor for infringing a stent patent.
It’s the biggest U.S. patent verdict in almost a year. Boston Scientific will seek to overturn the award, by a jury in Marshall, Texas, as “unsupported by both the evidence and the law,” and will appeal if necessary, the company said last week.
The case concerned two models of Taxus stents, which are mesh tubes that have a drug coating to help keep arteries from closing again after they are cleared. The jury found that Taxus Express and Taxus Liberte drug-eluting stents infringe upon a patent held by Bruce Saffran, and that the patent is valid, Boston Scientific said in a statement.
The lawsuit was filed by Saffran, a radiologist in Princeton, N.J., who received the patent for a drug-delivery device in 1997. Saffran was a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital when he did some work on this invention, said his lawyer, Eric Albritton.
“We’re obviously very pleased,” Albritton said in an interview. “We think the jury got it right.”
Saffran, who isn’t seeking to halt sales of the product, also has a similar case pending against Johnson & Johnson’s Cordis unit, Albritton said.
Boston Scientific, based in Natick, Mass., doesn’t expect the jury verdict to adversely affect earnings, spokesman Paul Donovan said.
The company earlier this month posted a fourth-quarter loss of $458 million, or 31 cents a share, on costs for legal expenses and job cuts. Revenue rose 4.2 percent to $2.15 billion. •