Juno Therapeutics Defeats Kite Pharma’s Challenge to CAR T-Cell Patent

On December 19, 2016 Juno Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: JUNO), a biopharmaceutical company developing innovative cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, reported that it has defeated an attempt to invalidate a patent exclusively licensed by Juno that covers, among other things, a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell used for the treatment of B-cell malignancies, and that it is suing Kite Pharma, Inc., seeking a declaratory judgment that Kite’s lead product candidate, KTE-C19, will infringe the patent when commercially produced(Press release, Juno, DEC 19, 2016, View Source [SID1234517122]).

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In August 2015, Kite Pharma, Inc. filed an inter partes review in the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in an attempt to invalidate U.S. Patent No. 7,446,190 by challenging all of its claims. Juno exclusively licenses the ’190 patent, titled "Nucleic Acids Encoding Chimeric T Cell Receptors," from Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, an affiliate of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The patent covers, among other things, a construct for a CD-19 targeted CAR T cell treatment that employs a CD28 costimulatory domain.

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office instituted a review of the patent and on December 16, 2016 issued a final written decision upholding all the claims of the patent.

"We are obviously pleased by the USPTO’s decision to uphold the patent," said Bernard J. "Barney" Cassidy, General Counsel of Juno Therapeutics. "Our efforts to amicably and reasonably resolve the dispute Kite initiated have been thwarted and today we are taking the next step towards fully resolving matters. Importantly, our filing will not prevent continued patient access while the legal dispute continues."

The lawsuit is being filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. Juno and the Sloan Kettering Institute are represented by Irell & Manella LLP in both the IPR and the litigation.