Ruling Ends Core Patent Dispute Between Cross-Town Rivals, SkinMedica and Histogen

A federal court ruling issued before the Thanksgiving holiday appears likely to end nearly three years of patent litigation between Histogen, a San Diego regenerative medicine startup, and Carlsbad, CA-based SkinMedica, which provides cosmetics and skin-care products.

“We are happy to now have this matter officially behind us,” Histogen founder and CEO Gail Naughton says in a statement issued today by the San Diego startup.

The Nov. 21 ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino concludes that Histogen is not infringing on two key SkinMedica patents. “The cloud has lifted for us,” Histogen spokeswoman Eileen Naughton Brandt told me this afternoon.

A spokeswoman for SkinMedica declined to comment today.

In its patent infringement lawsuit, SkinMedica alleged that Histogen and its cosmetics subsidiary, Histogen Aesthetics, were infringing on the patents covering its “NouriCel” product line and related proprietary technology for culturing human cells in growth media.

Histogen is focused on the long-term development of living tissue skin grafts and related products that would require regulatory approval. To generate revenue in the meantime, however, the startup formed Histogen Aesthetics to develop its own brand of skin care and dermatology products. Histogen says it also has begun early tests of a hair replacement product made of growth factors and other compounds expressed by fibroblasts, the cells that form connective tissue.

In her 14-page ruling, Sammartino distinguishes between SkinMedica’s patented process for growing a three-dimensional matrix of living human cells and Histogen’s approach, which encourages living cells to grow on the surface of microscopic beads. The cell-covered beads eventually clump together, and also grow into a three-dimensional matrix. By drawing a clear distinction between the two processes, Sammartino rejects SkinMedica’s arguments that the two approaches were equivalent.

The judge’s Nov. 21 ruling was preceded by a related ruling in May that addressed the meaning of more than a dozen disputed terms used in

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.