Rather than risk going to a trial that could’ve ended in penalties potentially reaching into the billions of dollars, Alcon has struck a settlement with Johnson & Johnson’s eye care segment over a lawsuit concerning femtosecond laser-assisted cataract surgery devices.
Alcon has agreed to pay J&J Vision $199 million, Alcon announced Sunday, the day before the jury trial was slated to begin.
The one-time payment will not only “resolve various worldwide intellectual property disputes” between the duo, per the announcement, but also secures Alcon licensing rights to some of J&J’s IP—and vice versa.
“As part of the resolution of this matter, the parties have exchanged cross-licenses of certain intellectual property and other mutually agreed covenants and releases,” J&J said in a statement sent to Fierce Medtech.
The lawsuit dates back to June 2020, when J&J’s Surgical Vision subsidiary filed a complaint alleging that Alcon’s LenSx laser system—which it acquired in 2010—comprises technology that directly infringes patents held by J&J.
Femtosecond lasers offer an alternative to traditional phacoemulsification procedures to remove cataracts from the eye. In a typical phaco procedure, a doctor uses a surgical blade to make incisions in the eye, a needle to create a flap in the lens capsule, an ultrasound probe to break up the cataract, then a vacuum to remove the pieces. The laser-assisted method, meanwhile, pares down the process, as the laser can be used to make the incisions and lens opening and to break up the cataract.
J&J’s Catalys and iFS laser systems make use of several technologies that have been patented and copyrighted, including the use of optical coherence tomography imaging to guide the laser. The iFS system also features a software platform that can help surgeons plan a procedure and guide them through it in real time.
Though J&J’s original 2020 complaint focused on claims that Alcon’s LenSx system had infringed the patented laser technology of the Catalys system, an amended complaint filed later that year zeroed in on allegations that Alcon’s system included a direct ripoff of the iFS software platform, which comprises copyrighted coding, user interfaces, structure and more.
The complaint alleged that J&J had found a number of similarities between the LenSx and iFS software programs, including identically named file folders, on-screen instructions with the same “punctuation and nonstandard capitalization” as iFS alerts and more than 300 references to “file, function and object names and other text” originally found in the iFS source code.
J&J said in the complaint that when it contacted Alcon about the identified similarities in July 2020, its competitor “did not deny that those similarities existed and continue to exist, and it provided no explanation for the telltale signs of copying that J&J Surgical Vision identified.”
J&J suggested that the “theft” occurred after Ron Kurtz, M.D., who co-founded IntraLase, the original maker of the iFS system, left to start LenSx in 2008 and proceeded to recruit several of his former colleagues at IntraLase—some of whom “had direct access to the iFS laser computer programs,” per the court filing.
In its response to the complaint, Alcon denied the alleged theft and claimed in return that J&J Surgical Vision had in fact infringed LenSx patents. The lawsuit, Alcon wrote at the time, was a “smoke screen” J&J was attempting to use to block LenSx sales.
In subsequent filings leading up to the jury trial that was scheduled to start this week, J&J expressed its intent to ask for up to $3.7 billion of Alcon’s profits from the LenSx system in damages.