Irides: Weekly global patent litigation update

This edition features updates from: Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (UK) and the Unified Patent Court (UPC).

The Irides Weekly Update is our round-up of patent litigation news highlights from around the world.
 

UK

Sacubitril/Valsartan Combination Patent and SPC upheld by Patents Court. [Accord v Novartis [2026] EWHC 2127 (Pat)]

In a decision handed down on 13 August 2026, the Patents Court (Meade J) has rejected a challenge brought by Accord to the validity of a patent and SPC owned by Novartis to the combination of sacubitril and valsartan. Sacubitril and valsartan are the active ingredients in Novartis’ Entresto® medicine which is authorised to treat heart failure in the UK and also authorised to treat hypertension in some other non-European countries. Accord challenged Novartis’ patent in numerous ways including classical obviousness over two items of prior art each combined with the common general knowledge, obviousness based on an allegation of mere collocation, obviousness for lack of technical contribution over two items of prior art and lack of plausibility.

Meade J rejected each of these attacks.  In relation to plausibility, the Judge held that, taking the PCT patent application leading to the patent in suit as a whole, there was a qualitative disclosure of the testing of the combination of sacubitril and valsartan in animal models for hypertension with positive results for the combination compared with the individual components. A separate attack on the SPC based on alleged lack of compliance with the SPC Regulation was also rejected with Meade J concluding that the “product” of Novartis’ SPC for the purposes of Art. 1(b) of the Regulation was the combination of the active ingredients sacubitril and valsartan and not the co-complex form of the two actives as contained in Entresto®.  Having reached this conclusion, the Judge held that the combination of sacubitril and valsartan was “protected” by the designated basic patent for the purposes of Art. 3(a) and also that a relevant authorisation existed to place the combination on the market for the purposes of Art. 3(b) of the Regulation.
 

Japan

JPO provides further guidance on prohibition on “multi-multi” claims.

"Multi-multi” or “multiple-multiple dependent” claims are dependent claims which (a) depend on multiple alternative claims (e.g. claim 4: “The product of any of claims 1-3...”); and (b) where at least one of those alternative claims also depends on multiple alternative claims (e.g. claim 3: “The product of claim 1 or 2”). In this example, claim 4 is a multi-multi claim since it depends on multiple claims (1-3) and claim 3 is itself depend on multiple alternative claims (1-2).

A prohibition on multi-multi claims has been in effect in Japan since 1 April 2022 – applications filed after the rule came into force must avoid this claim structure. However, in June 2026, the Japan Patent Office (JPO) updated its examination guidelines for multi-multi claims. This includes clarification that multi-multi claims will not be examined for other patentability requirements until the claim format has been corrected. If the claims are amended in response, any further objections arising from examination of the amended claims may be issued as a final notice of reasons for refusal. Use of the JPO’s multi-claim detection tool and voluntary amendment is therefore encouraged.

The latest figures suggest that applicants have largely adapted to the rule. According to the JPO, the proportion of patent applications containing multi-multi claims has fallen from around 65% before the restriction to approximately 2.6% on average in FY2025. For utility model applications, the equivalent figure has fallen from around 25% to approximately 1.5%.
 

UPC

Court of Appeal confirms retroactive effect of overturned UPC judgments, having no legal effect for enforcement purposes.
[Kodak v Fujifilm UPC-CoA-28/2026]

On 3 August 2026, the Court of Appeal set aside penalty orders requiring Kodak to pay €1.72 million for alleged non-compliance with an earlier infringement judgment in favour of Fujifilm. The appeal followed the Court’s earlier decision on the merits, in which the Mannheim Local Division’s (LD) infringement judgment was overturned and Kodak was found not to infringe because it could rely on a private prior use right, previously reported here and here. The consequence was that the foundation for the subsequent enforcement measures fell away entirely.

The Court held that the revocation of a first instance decision under Art. 75(1) UPCA and r. 242.1 RoP will, as a general rule, have retroactive effect. Referring to its earlier decision in Nanostring v 10X, the Court reiterated that a revoked order "must therefore be regarded as never having had any legal effect". That reasoning was held to apply not only to provisional measures but equally to a merits decision granting relief backed by penalty payments. Consequently, there was no legal basis for the subsequent penalty orders, even though they related to alleged breaches said to have occurred before the first instance infringement judgment was overturned.

The decision provides an important reminder of the risks associated with enforcing UPC decisions before appellate proceedings have concluded. The Court reaffirmed that enforcement pending appeal is undertaken at the enforcing party’s own risk. As the Court noted, where the underlying decision is later revoked, the legal basis for the enforcement measures disappears with it. The decision therefore demonstrates the potentially far-reaching consequences of a successful appeal, including the unwinding of enforcement measures, including penalty payments, that may already have been implemented.

The Court also addressed the valuation of enforcement proceedings. Kodak argued that the value should correspond to the €1.72 million penalty payment which it had been ordered to pay. The Court rejected that approach, holding that the relevant benchmark is the claimant’s objective interest in securing compliance with the underlying orders. Because penalty payments are payable to the Court and contain coercive and punitive elements, they do not reflect the claimant’s economic interest in the proceedings. The Court therefore determined the value of the enforcement proceedings to be €1 million, representing Fujifilm’s interest in the proper fulfilment of the obligations that the penalties were intended to incentivise. The decision is also notable for confirming that, even on an appeal brought by a defendant, the value of the appeal continues to be assessed by reference to the claimant’s interest in upholding the decision rather than the defendant’s interest in having it overturned.

The Court further rejected Fujifilm’s argument that Kodak’s conduct during the enforcement process should affect the allocation of costs. Fujifilm had contended that Kodak’s alleged delays and incomplete compliance had unnecessarily increased the complexity and expense of the enforcement proceedings. However, the Court held that there was "no room for assessment" of Kodak’s conduct once the underlying infringement decision had been set aside. Since the revoked decision had to be treated as never having had legal effect, there was no basis for criticising Kodak by reference to obligations which, retroactively, had never existed. Fujifilm was therefore the unsuccessful party for the purposes of Art. 69 UPCA and was ordered to bear Kodak’s legal costs and other expenses of the enforcement proceedings. 

Finally, the Court ordered that the penalty payments already made by Kodak be refunded.
 

UPC

Cybex secures preliminary injunction as Hamburg Local Division endorses narrowed claim formulation.
[Cybex v Nuna UPC_CFI 1321/2026]

On 10 August 2026, the Hamburg LD granted a preliminary injunction in favour of Cybex GmbH (Cybex) in a dispute concerning a modular car seat system for children. The decision provides important guidance on three issues that are likely to be of wider interest to UPC litigants contemplating the use of provisional measures.

First, the Court confirmed that a patentee may seek interim relief on the basis of a claim formulation narrower than the patent as granted, and that doing so does not in itself prevent the grant of a PI. Second, the Court refused to admit auxiliary claim amendment requests introduced for the first time in the reply, finding that they would have unfairly curtailed the defendant’s opportunity to prepare a validity defence within the compressed timetable of PI proceedings. Third, the Court’s order gave guidance on how necessity is to be applied in a PI request when the accused products have been on the market since before the patent was granted.

The outcome of proceedings was that Nuna's "base curv" system, when used with certain compatible seat units, was held likely to infringe and that the asserted claim formulation was likely valid. The Court granted a preliminary injunction on the basis of both direct and indirect infringement, ordered disclosure of supply chain information and awarded Cybex €56,000 in provisional costs. The defendant was ordered to bear 90% of the costs of the proceedings, the reduction of 10% reflecting that there was no evidence to suggest one of the accused products, the “arra next” seat unit, infringed the patent.

The first point of note is the Court’s treatment of Cybex’s decision to assert a claim set narrower than the granted patent. Cybex relied on a combination of granted claims 1 and 2, rather than the claims as granted in their original form. The defendants argued that this should weigh against the grant of interim relief, particularly because the specific formulation had not itself been examined during prosecution. The Hamburg LD rejected that argument, relying on the Court of Appeal’s order in Onward v Niche (Court of Appeal, Order of 27 March 2026, UPC_CoA_898/2025, para. 39) and confirmed that “the assertion of a non-registered version of a claim is not precluded from the outset, even in proceedings for the granting of interim measures”. At the same time, the court recognized that the asserted claim formulation did not benefit from any presumption of validity as it had not been subject to appropriate scrutiny during examination. Nevertheless, on the basis of its own analysis, the court concluded that Cybex had demonstrated that the asserted version was likely valid. This illustrates that the UPC is willing to engage substantively with the validity of a narrowed claim formulation, rather than treating the absence of examination of that precise wording as a procedural obstacle to interim relief.

The second issue concerns the limit to which the claim amendment may be relied on in the compressed timetable of PI proceedings. Although the court accepted, consistently with Onward v Niche, that auxiliary requests can in principle be admissible in interim proceedings, it emphasised that the summary nature of such proceedings requires careful consideration of procedural fairness. Cybex introduced revised alternative claims for the first time in its reply. Those requests added a feature which was not the subject of a dependent claim in that form. The Court considered that admitting these requests would have left the defendants with only a very limited opportunity to investigate and challenge validity. The new alternative claims were therefore rejected as inadmissible.

Finally, the order also applies the UPC’s principles of necessity in PI applications to an interesting factual constellation. Although the accused products had been on the market before grant of the patent, the court held that the nature of the market supported immediate relief. Referring to the Court of Appeal’s order in Biolitec v Light Guide (Court of Appeal, Order of 24 February 2025, UPC_CoA_540/2024, para. 39) the Court observed that it was not merely necessary to take into account the harm for either of the parties but also to consider the “time factor” - whether it would be possible to await proceedings on the merits or whether provisional measures were truly necessary. In this case, the Court considered that child seat systems are durable products purchased to satisfy a family’s needs over several years, and that waiting for a decision on the merits would risk the permanent loss of customers. That factor, together with the Court’s conclusion that the defendants could continue to market alternative products, supported the grant of UPC wide interim relief.

New episodes: You, Me and the UPC: Case by case

Episode 80: Court of Appeal confirms scope for reliance on dependent claims in revocation proceedings.

Episode 81: Düsseldorf Local Division clarifies the scope of NDAs in FRAND negotiations.