The Reply materials consistently disregard and misstate the evidence— including Dr. Wermeling’s clear recognition of a “significant unmet medical need to serve the pharmacotherapeutic requirements of epilepsy patients through commercial development and marketing of intranasal antiepileptic products” in 2009.
1 Aquestive’s Reply shenanigans are part of an ongoing harassment campaign against Neurelis—here, at the FDA, and in the press—to distract investors from Aquestive’s failure to produce its buccal epilepsy therapy and has forced Neurelis to pursue a tort action against Aquestive in California superior court.
that a “reply may only respond to arguments raised in the corresponding opposition or patent owner response,” which does not include the Institution Decision.3 Aquestive’s remaining explanations also lack merit, ranging from again changing the POSA definition (“transmembrane” becomes “transmembrane/transmucosal”, Paper 26, 2), to avoiding the Petition’s complete failure to address the SIGMA Catalog (EX2006) incorporation in the ‘558 provisional (Petition, 5-6).
Aquestive Fails to Rebut the Absence of Any Motivation to Combine or Reasonable Expectation of Success for the References The Reply provides another new, baseless theory that a POSA would have circumvented benzodiazepine precipitation by cutting the dose in half and administering the drug in both nostrils.
Aquestive would attribute the lack of a viable alternative to Diastat®13 to “regulatory requirements, investment, market size, cost of competing products, and existing off-label use of benzodiazepines (diazepam, lorazepam) administered intranasally.” Reply, 29 (citing EX1150, ¶¶46-12614).