Daniel Knauss

The Chapter 11 plan of PhaseBio Pharmaceuticals, a long-standing Cooley life sciences client, has gone effective following the court’s confirmation of the Chapter 11 plan on June 26, 2024. The plan provides for a global settlement with the official committee of unsecured creditors and a settlement with PhaseBio’s former co-development partner. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy case in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware was handled by a multioffice, cross-disciplinary Cooley team.

Cooley successfully defeated an emergency motion for injunction for Samsung in Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. et al. v. Samsung Bioepis Co. Ltd. before District Judge Gregory Williams in ongoing Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA) litigation for its proposed biosimilar Soliris, which is used to treat blood disorders.

Cooley successfully lifted a Hatch-Waxman injunction for Liquidia Technologies, a late-stage clinical biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of novel products, enabling Liquidia to launch its new drug, Yutrepia.

In August 2020, Cooley convinced a panel of judges at the PTAB to protect a key patent for CoolIT, a leader in data center cooling. A three-judge panel upheld the validity of all challenged claims while adopting arguments Cooley advanced against Petitioner’s expert and his proposed prior art combination.

Few patent cases make it all the way to the Supreme Court. Even fewer involve a dispute in which a company's very survival is at stake. Since 2011, our client Gevo, a pioneer in the biofuels industry, and Butamax, a joint venture of giants BP and DuPont, had been trading blows, filing close to a dozen patent suits against each other. Butamax initially brought suit in the District of Delaware in an attempt to knock Gevo out of the emerging market for isobutanol alternative energy. In that case, the court granted summary judgment of noninfringement in favor of Gevo, prompting Butamax to appeal. On appeal, the Federal Circuit rejected the district court's claim construction and issued a new claim construction that vacated the noninfringement ruling.

In response, Cooley took the case to the US Supreme Court and, in January 2015, the high court granted our petition for writ of certiorari, vacating the judgment against Gevo and remanding the case back to the Federal Circuit for further consideration. This decision, and numerous other victories including key summary judgment victories, paved the path for Gevo to reach a favorable global patent cross-license and settlement agreement with Butamax. The agreement forms a partnership between the two biofuel companies aimed at leveraging one another's technology.