The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has issued a preliminary injunction preventing the marketing and sale of an Aegis Spine line of products.
The injunction relates to Aegis Spine's AccelFix-XT line of expandable cages, which the court determined were reverse engineered from Life Spine's ProLift expandable cage.
As Life Spine's distributor, Aegis Spine used its access to ProLift to "discover the underlying specifications of the ProLift and then shared that information with surgeon consultants [and its parent company L&K Biomed] to reverse engineer the ProLift," according to the court.
The court said Life Spine is likely to succeed at trial proving several of its claims, including breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and misappropriation of trade secrets.
"We appreciate the court's thorough analysis of the issues and we are gratified that the court's order protects the years of hard work spent developing our ProLift series of products," Michael Butler, CEO of Life Spine, said in an April 6 news release.