The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has issued a preliminary injunction against Aegis Spine, Inc., enjoining the company from, among other things, the developing, manufacturing, marketing, or selling of any items in the AccelFix-XT line of medical devices.
Oops! Court Says Company Reverse Engineered Expandable Cage
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The thorough preliminary injunction relates to an ongoing litigation battle between Huntley, Illinois-based Life Spine, Inc. and Englewood, Colorado-based Aegis Spine, Inc. Life Spine’s claims against Aegis include breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and misappropriation of trade secrets.
Life Spine designs, develops, and manufactures products for the spinal medical device industry, including its ProLift Expandable Spacer System. According to court documents, ProLift is Life Spine’s best-selling device. It is “made up of a small implant” and “an installer.” The expandable cage is inserted into the patient’s spine to restore spinal disc height.
Aegis is a medical device company that distributes spine implants and interbody devices. It is a subsidiary of South Korea-based L&K Biomed, Inc. Per court documents, L&K is a “direct competitor of Life Spine in the medical device market.”
In 2018, Life Spine and Aegis entered into a distribution and billing agreement “authorizing Aegis to solicit sales of the ProLift from a list of surgeons.” Shortly after, Aegis held an “Expandable Cage Kickoff Meeting.” During the meeting presentations were made “related to the plan to develop an expandable cage—what is now sold by Aegis as AccelFix-XT—that would compete with the ProLift.”
Life Spine sued Aegis and obtained a preliminary injunction. In its opinion the court explained that “Aegis attempted to and did discover the underlying specifications of the ProLift and then shared that information with surgeon consultants and L&K to reverse engineer the ProLift.”
In its press release, Life Spine CEO Michael Butler commented, “We appreciate the [c]ourt’s thorough analysis of the issues and we are gratified that the [c]ourt’s order protects the years of hard work spent developing our ProLift series of products.”
Aegis Spine will not be caged in. The company has already filed a notice of appeal from the district court’s March 15, 2021 preliminary injunction order.
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This is a fascinating development. In my practice we've seen similar outcomes with the revised protocol. The key differentiator seems to be patient selection criteria. Has anyone else noticed the correlation with BMI thresholds?
Great point. I'd push back slightly on the conclusion, the sample size in the cited study is too small to draw population-level inferences. That said, the directional signal is compelling and worth a larger RCT.
We implemented a similar approach last year. Early results are promising but we're still gathering 12-month follow-up data. Happy to share our protocol if anyone is interested.
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