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Bristol-Myers Patent Win Over Gilead Grows to $1.2 Billion

Bristol-Myers Patent Win Over Gilead Balloons to $1.2 Billion

(Bloomberg) -- Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. persuaded a judge to boost damages to $1.2 billion in its patent-infringement case against Gilead Sciences Inc.’s Kite unit over revolutionary treatments that use a body’s own immune system to fight cancer.

Gilead owes Bristol-Myers enhanced damages of $389 million and pre-judgment interest of $33 million, on top of more than $778 million awarded in December by a federal jury, U.S. District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez ruled.

Bristol-Myers was seeking as much as $1.5 billion in a fight that began in 2017 in Los Angeles federal court.

Gilead plans to appeal, according to a spokesman who said the judgment “is legally unsupportable and will be reversed.

The dispute is over a pioneering technique known as CAR-T, in which the T cells of a person’s own immune system are modified to attack cancer cells.

Kite makes Yescarta for the treatment of certain types of large B-cell lymphoma, a blood cancer. The top-selling drug brought in sales of $456 million in 2019, according to Bloomberg data.

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