Litigators of the Week: This Covington Trial Team Protected AbbVie’s $8B Per Year Cancer Treatment From a Generic Challenge

Christopher Sipes, Erica Andersen, and Brianne Bharkhda were interviewed by Litigation Daily describing the process behind the trial for which they were awarded “Litigators of the Week” by The American Lawyer. The Covington team represented Pharmacyclics LLC, an AbbVie affiliate, and included Christopher Sipes, Erica Andersen, Brianne Bharkhda, Alexa Hansen, Eric Sonnenschein, Chanson Chang, and Nicholas Evoy as well as Dave Garr and former associates Laura Dolbow, Evan Krygowski and Anna Han.

Christopher Sipes was asked to describe who the client was and what was at stake. He replied, “Our client is Pharmacyclics LLC, which is part of AbbVie. Pharmacyclics’s scientists invented the drug substance and launched its development into a blockbuster cancer treatment. Our co-plaintiff, Janssen, helps market the drug. Pharmacyclics owns the intellectual property. Alvogen argued that the asserted patents associated were asserted against it were invalid. That is, Alvogen essentially admitted that it was using Pharmacyclics’s inventions; it simply argued they weren’t inventions at all. Our job was to show that wasn’t true.”

In the end, U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly ruled the Imbruvica patents valid and were infringed upon by Alvogen.