Juno Therapeutics and Sloan Kettering Seek Supreme Court to Reinstate Jury Victory Over Patent Case

Bristol Myers Squibb subsidiary Juno Therapeutics and the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research have petitioned the Supreme Court to reinstate a $1.2 billion jury award in their patent suit with Gilead Sciences’ Kite Pharma over their chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) technology.

The patent in question involves a CAR invention that “allowed the creation of CAR-T cells that not only kill cancer cells in the body, but also replicate, building an army of CAR-T cells inside the patient that will destroy even more cancer cells,” the plaintiffs said.

The plaintiffs accused Kite Pharma of illegally using their technology in Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel), which is FDA-approved for treatment of two types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

In August 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned the $1.2 billion award by a federal judge following a jury trial in 2020.