Boston Scientific's Medinol fight restarts

Medical devices giant Boston Scientific goes to court today in the latest round of its four-year battle with former Israeli partner Medinol.

The trial is part of a sequence of litigation relating to the company's core products, stents - tiny wire mesh tubes that are used to hold open arteries after surgical procedures. It dates back to the discovery of a secret operation in Ireland, where the company employs more than 3,000 people, to copy a Medinol machine used to produce the stents.

The company will be hoping for a change of fortune in the five-week trial before a federal court in New York. Last week, a Delaware jury found Boston Scientific guilty of infringing a patent held by rival Johnson & Johnson in the design of its Taxus stent.

Three days after the Delaware ruling, Boston Scientific paid $74 million (€61.2 million) to settle allegations by the US Department of Justice that it had distributed faulty coronary stents. The action related to a product recall of the NIR stent in 1998 and was settled without admission of liability

A New York judge has already ruled that Boston Scientific breached its contract with Medinol when it established its Irish project to replicate the machine Medinol used to produce the NIR stent for supply to the company.