WASHINGTON, May 23, 2007 – The international law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, led by partner Robert J. Koch and of counsel Jay I. Alexander, together with co-trial counsel Francis M. (“Fran”) Wikstrom, a litigation partner in the Salt Lake City, Utah office of Parsons Behle & Latimer, won a long-awaited victory with a unanimous jury verdict for biotechnology company Invitrogen Corporation on May 17 in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, Southern Division. The complaint, filed more than ten years ago, charged biotechnology company Clontech Laboratories, Inc. with patent infringement of Invitrogen's patents covering its genetically engineered reverse transcriptase enzyme – a critical scientific tool used for cloning DNA in laboratories worldwide.

Commenting on the verdict, Mr. Koch, who filed the complaint in December of 1996, stated, “This decision begins to create a framework for application of the recent Supreme Court decision in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. After more than a decade of litigation on behalf of Invitrogen, it is particularly rewarding to have the jury reach a unanimous decision in our favor. The complexity of the underlying science combined with the multiple patents and number of claims involved, contributed to the duration of the litigation.”

After deliberating three hours, the jury found Clontech guilty of willful infringement of all of the patent claims that have survived two previous trials and three appeals to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The jury also upheld the validity of Invitrogen's patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,063,608) by rejecting Clontech's defenses of prior invention by researchers at Columbia University and obviousness, argued under the new, virtually untested, legal calculus of the April 30th Supreme Court decision in KSR International Co. v Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S.___(2007). In particular, the jury rejected the argument that the ‘608 patent need not be presumed valid because it had been examined under a substantially different legal standard before the KSR decision. The willful infringement finding permits the court to award enhanced damages and attorneys fees. A trial on the bifurcated issue of damages is expected to begin before the same jury next week.

This verdict is another step in the ongoing patent litigation between Invitrogen and Clontech, which was the subject of three previous appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on various issues relating to the infringement and validity of Invitrogen’s patents as well as the propriety of Invitrogen’s patent marking practices.

In addition to Mr. Koch and Mr. Alexander, the Milbank team of intellectual property attorneys included associates Einar Stole, Lisa Coward, Allison Fulton, Jason Lagria, Naseema Shafi, Nga Phan, Kim Arthurs, and Nora Sherry, all in the firm’s Washington, DC office.