Medical Device Manufacturer Kurin Wins Complete Appellate Victory in Patent Dispute Brought by Competitor Magnolia Medical

Paul, Weiss secured a major appellate victory on behalf of Kurin, Inc., in a case brought by Magnolia Medical alleging that our client’s revolutionary Kurin Lock product infringes two Magnolia patents covering devices used to reduce blood culture contaminations. In a complete victory for Kurin, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed both the trial court’s claim construction ruling precluding infringement by Kurin of one of the patents, and the court’s decision granting judgment as a matter of law of noninfringement by Kurin of the second patent in suit.

The novel Kurin Lock device is used to sideline contaminants from a patient’s skin during blood culture collection, solving a problem that led to false-positive blood cultures resulting in unnecessary antibiotic use and prolonged hospital stays. Unlike a competing device from Magnolia, the Kurin Lock was small and simple to use, which resulted in much more widespread implementation within hospitals.

Prior to trial, Chief Judge Colm Connolly in the District of Delaware accepted Kurin’s arguments regarding the interpretation of the claims of the first patent in suit, resulting in Magnolia entering into a stipulation of no infringement as to that patent. After a jury trial on the second patent and the filing of a motion by Magnolia to permanently enjoin Kurin from selling the Kurin Lock in the United States, Judge Connolly granted Kurin’s post-trial motion for judgment as a matter of law that the Kurin Lock did not infringe, and entered final judgment in Kurin’s favor.

In affirming the claim interpretation underlying noninfringement of the first patent, the Federal Circuit agreed with Kurin that the claims should properly be interpreted as containing a “means-plus-function” term limited to only the corresponding structures in the patent’s specification. Magnolia had stipulated that those structures were not found in the Kurin Lock.

Regarding the second patent, the Federal Circuit found that the patent claims required the presence in the accused Kurin Lock of both a “vent” and a “seal,” and that Magnolia had impermissibly sought to argue that a single structure in the Kurin Lock—a porous plug—met both requirements at different points in time. The Federal Circuit noted that its precedent dictated that “[b]ecause the accused product did not have separate structures corresponding to the two claim limitations, it could not infringe as a matter of law.”

The Paul, Weiss team includes litigation partner Catherine Nyarady and counsel Kripa Raman and David Cole.