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 A jury in Los Angeles awarded the damages after finding that
Yescarta, a treatment sold by Gilead's Kite Pharma unit, infringed
on a patent exclusively licensed by Bristol-Myers' Juno Therapeutics
division.
The patent at issue in the lawsuit, which Juno licenses from the
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, relates to CAR
T-cell immunotherapy for cancer.
CAR-T therapy involves a process of removing T cells from a
patient's immune system, engineering them to better identify and
attack cancer cells and infusing them back into the patient.
Bristol-Myers said in a statement that it was pleased with the
verdict.
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Gilead disagreed with the decision.
"We remain steadfast in our opinion that Sloan Kettering's patent is
not infringed and is invalid," Gilead said in a statement. "Given
that Kite independently developed Yescarta and assumed all of the
risk in its discovery and development, we do not believe Sloan
Kettering and Juno are entitled to any level of damages."
Gilead said it expected to seek to undo the verdict through
post-trial motions and an appeal.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe in Washington and Manojna Maddipatla in
Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Bill Berkrot)
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