Abbott and Dexcom are two leaders in the continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) space. They offer market-leading platforms, with Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre 3 and Dexcom’s G7 representing their latest-generation technologies.
Dexcom requested that the court find infringement by Abbott and its LibreLinkUp remote analyte monitoring system. That includes the LibreLinkUp application connected to the LibreView server, the FreeStyle Libre 3 sensor unit and the FreeStyle Libre 3 application.
The San Diego-based company owns European Patent 3 831 282 (EP282). It relates to remote monitoring — particularly monitoring of glucose levels in people with diabetes. The patent covers the sharing of glucose information from the CGM with other people (family, friends, providers, etc.) so those people can support the user in their glucose management. According to the Unified Patent Court, this patent is at the heart of ongoing global litigation between Dexcom and Abbott.
The court revoked EP282 in its entirety across the contracting member states in Europe as specified by Abbott’s request. It dismissed all of Dexcom’s infringement claims based on the patent at issue.
More about the Dexcom and Abbott patent spat
Dexcom aimed to amend the patent, with Abbott seeking revocation. The court agreed with Dexcom on one claim in the patent that outlines a patient’s wishes to share their glucose information and their ability to tailor settings. Abbott and Dexcom partly disagree on features there relating to servers used for those settings. The court said the feature “is of a rather generic nature” and can cover implementation with several apparatuses for more than one processing function, siding with Dexcom.
However, in relation to “rules” for notifications with the systems, the court disagreed with Dexcom. The company argued that certain features should be interpreted as implicitly meaning that the server must be configured to trigger notification messages according to the set of rules, but modified based on the modifications to the system settings.
The court ruled Dexcom’s interpretation unjustified, saying the patent claim can’t serve only as a guideline. It said Dexcom’s interpretation falls in line with the patent’s description, but “adopting it for the purposes of claim interpretation would lead to an incompatibility with the wording of several claim features… thus going beyond using the description and the drawings as explanatory aids for the interpretation of the patent claim.”
Dexcom’s interpretation, the court says, does not contain any ambiguities to be resolved and it permits a technically reasonable interpretation. According to the court, an interpretation like that “would not combine adequate protection for the patent proprietor with sufficient legal certainty for third parties, to the detriment of third parties in the present case.”
