Aerocrine allowed to add a third patent to its infringment complaint against Apieron

www.aerocrine.com/Aug 19 2009

Aerocrine AB today announced that the United States District Court has accepted Aerocrine’s motion for leave to add a third patent to its October 2008 patent infringement complaint against Apieron, Inc. Menlow Park, USA.

The founders of Aerocrine made the original discovery in 1991 through 1993 that nitric oxide (NO) in exhaled breath is elevated in patients with asthma. Based on proprietary technology, Aerocrine has pioneered the development of medical devices and the method to monitor airway inflammation by measuring exhaled NO.

Aerocrine’s first device, NIOX, received CE marking in Europe in 2000 and FDA clearance in the US in 2003. NIOX MINO, the first handheld device for exhaled NO monitoring in clinical practice, received CE marking in 2004 and FDA clearance in early 2008. To date, more than 2.5 million patient tests have been performed around the world using Aerocrine’s exhaled NO monitoring systems.

Aerocrine has applied for and received numerous patents that protect its inventions for monitoring airway inflammation by measuring exhaled NO. Following Apieron’s initial US commercialization in 2008 of its first exhaled NO device Insight Aerocrine filed complaints against Apieron on the grounds that Aerocrine considers three of its US patents to be infringed.

Apieron recently made public that it has filed a complaint against Aerocrine in Germany on the grounds that Apieron considers the German part of its European patent EP 0 892 926 to be infringed. This patent, originally filed in 1996, was acquired by Apieron in 2004 and does not relate to discoveries made by Apieron. Apieron’s product is not sold in Europe.