Intervet Wins Pig Vaccine Patent Suit -- Against Its Likely "Future Self"(?!)

As irony would have it, things are getting increasingly tangled in the Merck/Schering-Plough web. How so? Well, Intervet (presently owned by Schering-Plough) just won a patent suit against Merial -- at the moment, 50 percent owned by Merck. Huh.

So, now that Merck has signed to reverse merge with Schering-Plough, and Sanofi-Aventis has agreed to buy the 50 percent of Merial, from Merck, that it doesn't already own, AND Sanofi will have a call option on all of Intervet, should the Schering-Plough/Merck merger close -- Whew! -- Thus. . . it is at least possible, if not likely, that Schering's current Intervet unit just won a patent victory. . . against its (future) self. Per Law 360^o's blurb, tonight:

. . . .A federal judge has granted a summary judgment of noninfringement to Schering-Plough unit Intervet Inc. in its declaratory judgment case against rival Merial Ltd. over a patent covering a pig vaccine.

Intervet's vaccine did not infringe literally, and Merial may not invoke the doctrine of equivalents, Judge Henry H. Kennedy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said. . . .

In some ways, this reminds me of that largely lame Coke commercial, aired during the Super Bowl a few years back, where the Coke guys wanted to sue the Coke Zero guys. . . for taste infringement. Yeh. I never really thought that commercial was very clever, either. Huh.