Untitled case

I'll start by researching the case number, the patent, and the parties.

Let me identify the specific patent and search the docket directly.

Case Overview and Background — 3:18-cv-11213 (D.N.J.) and U.S. Patent No. 5,073,543

Bottom line up front: The patent has been positively identified, but the parties to the D.N.J. action could not be verified from open sources within this research pass. The 1991 issue date and the technology (liposomal nerve-growth-factor drug delivery) make the patent–docket association in the Google Patents/Unified Patents litigation record look unreliable, consistent with the caution flagged in the earlier section of this summary. The overview below therefore separates what is documented from what remains open, and sets out the verification steps needed before this case is characterized as an NPE/PAE assertion (or anything else).

The patent (verified). U.S. Patent No. 5,073,543, "Controlled Release Formulations of Trophic Factors in Ganglioside-Lipsome Vehicle," issued December 17, 1991, prosecuted through Pfizer Inc. (Pfizer is identified as the attorney/agent firm of record on the face of the patent; assignment history should be confirmed in USPTO Patent Center/Assignment records). Technically, the '543 patent claims a method of systemically administering a trophic factor — NGF, β-NGF, or des 1-9 NGF — in a carrier comprising a phospholipid component plus a ganglioside (GM1, GD1, GT1), typically in the form of a vesicle/liposome whose shell wall is formed from the lipid and ganglioside, so that the factor is slowly released or protected from degradative enzymes, for treatment of neurodegenerative disease or protection/regeneration of neural tissue. Claim 1 is the systemic-administration method claim; dependent claims narrow the carrier to vesicles, specify wall-stabilizing components, and recite particular phospholipids (DPPC, DSPC, DMPC, DPPE, DPPS, DSPS, DMPS), with claim 7 fixing DPPC. It is a formulation/drug-delivery patent in the neuropharmacology space, not a device or electronics patent. Two immediate consequences follow: (i) on its face, a patent issuing in December 1991 carried a 17-year term from issuance and would have expired in December 2008 absent any extension; maintenance-fee and expiry status should be confirmed in Patent Center before any assertion theory is credited; and (ii) there is no evidence in the sources reviewed of a parallel PTAB proceeding against this patent — the many IPR documents that surface in searches for "the '543 patent" belong to unrelated patents (EMD Millipore's fluid-transfer '543, Server Technology's power-strip '543, W&W Sens/Samsung's image-sensor '543, Nelson Products' 8,375,543), a conflation risk worth flagging because secondary databases frequently merge same-numbered patents.

The case (unverified). Docket 3:18-cv-11213 is in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. The "3" prefix places it in the Trenton vicinage; the filing date, presiding judge, plaintiff, defendant, accused product, and outcome are not confirmed here — searches for the docket number returned no reliable hit on CourtListener/RECAP, Justia, Trellis, Docket Alarm, or press coverage, and the research pass terminated before PACER could be queried directly. Because party identity is unknown, this summary cannot responsibly classify either side (operating company, PAE, university, or competitor), cannot identify the accused product or service, and cannot explain the venue rationale beyond the generic points: D.N.J. is a popular patent venue (a large pharmaceutical/medical-device corporate base, including Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Becton Dickinson, Celgene and Novartis affiliates, plus a bench experienced in ANDA and Hatch-Waxman cases), and in 2018 a plaintiff filing there typically relied on corporate residency or acts of infringement in the district rather than on the more aggressive venue theories later curtailed by TC Heartland/Valeant. The procedural posture — whether the case drew a Markman, an IPR stay, a Rule 12(b)(6) or § 101 dismissal, or an early settlement — is likewise unverified.

Verification plan and why the association should be treated skeptically. The decisive next steps are: (1) pull the docket and complaint (and any dispositive opinions) via PACER, with free alternatives CourtListener/RECAP, Justia's D.N.J. docket index, Trellis, and Docket Alarm; (2) cross-check Unified Patents' and RPX's litigation databases and Google Patents' "Litigation" tab to see whether the '543 association came from a Darts-IP-derived bulk mapping rather than from an actual asserted-patent list; and (3) confirm the patent's legal status (expiry, maintenance fees, any reissue/reexam, current assignee) in USPTO Patent Center and Assignment Search. My working hypothesis — stated as a hypothesis, not a finding — is that the Google Patents/Unified Patents entry is an over-inclusive or mis-keyed association (a 2018 suit asserting an expired 1991 Pfizer liposome patent against an operating company would be an outlier, and no such case surfaced in any of the sources searched). Until the docket is read, the case should not be described as notable: the "notability" hooks one would normally build — PAE assertion pattern, IPR linkage, industry impact — are entirely speculative here, and the market-context story for this patent family (trophic-factor/ganglioside liposome delivery for neurodegenerative disease, a research area that largely stalled commercially) does not by itself supply a litigation narrative. I have deliberately not named counsel, judges, or outcomes, because none of those facts could be sourced.

I'll research this case systematically, starting with the docket and patent identification.

The case number appears to map to a different matter than the patent listed. Let me verify both independently.

The docket number maps to a Hatch-Waxman case, not the listed patent. Let me identify US 5,073,543 and check whether it has any litigation history at all.

I'll research this case to identify the parties and counsel of record.

Bottom line first

I could not verify the plaintiff's counsel directly off the 3:18-cv-11213 docket sheet — and the case metadata you gave me has an internal conflict that needs to be resolved before any counsel list can be stated as fact. Two independent parts of the record disagree about who the parties are, and the patent number in the metadata does not match either candidate case. I am flagging rather than guessing.

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1. What the record actually shows (and where it conflicts)

Candidate A — Celgene Corp. v. MSN Laboratories Private Ltd. (Revlimid/lenalidomide ANDA litigation)

• A complaint filed in D.N.J. on June 29, 2018 and filed at Docket No. 1 in gov.uscourts.njd.379205 contains a L. Civ. R. 11.2/40.1 certification stating the filing party's matters "captioned Celgene Corporation v. Macleods Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Civil Action No. 3:18-cv-11212, Celgene Corporation v. MSN Laboratories Private Ltd., Civil Action No. 3:18-cv-11213, [and] Celgene Corporation v. Cipla Limited…" (archive copy of ECF No. 1). This is a primary court filing and is the strongest evidence I found.
• Corroboration: the lenalidomide antitrust MDL complaint cites "Civ. No. 3:18-11213, ECF No. 40 (Stipulation and Order)" for the proposition that "MSN has admitted … that the '638 and the '536 Patents are valid and enforceable" (D.N.J. MDL ECF).

Candidate B — Amgen Inc. v. MSN Laboratories Private Ltd. (Sensipar/cinacalcet litigation)

• Patexia's docket index for "Case number 3:18-cv-11213" lists the caption "AMGEN INC. v. MSN LABORATORIES PRIVATE LTD." with 2020 docket activity: pro hac vice orders and ECF notices for Wendy A. Whiteford, Eric Agovino, C. Nichole Gifford, Gregory D. Bonifield, and Dennis Smith, and a consolidation order deeming counsel admitted "in any of the Consolidated Actions … in Civil Action No. 18-11026" (Patexia docket).

Patent number mismatch. I was unable to confirm what US 5,073,543 covers — I exhausted my search budget before resolving it. What I can say is negative but useful: it is a 1991-issued patent, and it does not appear in the lenalidomide/Revlimid patent families (which begin in 1996 with the '517 patent) or in the Amgen Sensipar families. The '543 patent association in the Google Patents/Unified Patents entry is very likely an over-inclusive or erroneous mapping, consistent with the caution already in the case summary. Do not treat the patent number as a party-identification anchor.

Net: the court + case-number metadata you gave me most plausibly resolves to Celgene Corp. v. MSN Laboratories Private Ltd., but Patexia's docket contents for the same number are Amgen's Sensipar team. Until someone pulls the actual docket sheet, any counsel list is provisional. Everything below is labeled by confidence.

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2. Plaintiff's counsel — Candidate A (Celgene as plaintiff)

Confidence in party identification: moderate-high. Confidence that these attorneys appeared in this specific 2018 docket: unverified — I could not retrieve appearances.

Caution — do not confuse with the antitrust defense team. In In re Lenalidomide Antitrust Litig. (D.N.J., Judge Salas), Celgene and BMS were defendants, represented by John E. Schmidtlein, David S. Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, Benjamin M. Greenblum, and Carol J. Pruski of Williams & Connolly LLP (Washington, DC), with Daniel R. Guadalupe of Pashman Stein Walder Hayden, P.C. (Hackensack, NJ) as local counsel (ECF 104). Those attorneys are on the other side of the "v." from a plaintiff-counsel inquiry, but secondary sources routinely conflate the two Celgene dockets — a real risk in any counsel verification here.

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3. Plaintiff's counsel — Candidate B (Amgen as plaintiff)

Confidence in party identification: low-moderate (single commercial database). Names below are as docketed in that database; I could not independently confirm firm affiliations, so I am not asserting them.

I'll research this docket and the parties before naming any counsel.

Bottom line

I could not identify any counsel of record — and I am not going to name any — because I could not verify that this docket number is actually a patent infringement suit over US 5,073,543. The searches surfaced no caption, no complaint, no appearance, and no opinion for 3:18-cv-11213 tying it to that patent. Reporting a roster of attorneys here would mean inventing it, which I won't do.

What the record check did turn up, however, materially undercuts the premise of the question:

1. The patent itself cannot have been asserted in 2018

US 5,073,543 is "Controlled release formulations of trophic factors in ganglioside-liposome vehicle," to Marshall et al., issued December 17, 1991 (Google Patents, US5073543A). It surfaces in the literature almost exclusively as a cited reference in later pharmaceutical/controlled-release patents (e.g., EP 3,285,795; EP 2,627,349; EP 3,542,800; US 7,642,287; US 8,110,602), which is exactly the citation pattern that generates false "litigation" edges in aggregated patent databases.

Applied to a 1991-issued patent claiming priority to a late-1980s application, the pre-URAA term rule (greater of 17 years from issue or 20 years from filing) puts expiration around December 2008 — a decade before the 2018 filing date posited by the metadata. A 2018 infringement claim on this patent is not plausible absent reissue/renewal facts that are nowhere in the record.

2. What that means for "counsel of record"

Because the patent-in-suit attribution appears unreliable, the case number itself may be one of two things:

• A different case entirely that a patent-aggregation pipeline mis-tagged to the '543 patent; or
• A 2018 D.N.J. matter involving a different patent where the '543 patent appears only as background/prior art in the complaint — a well-known over-inclusion artifact in Google Patents/Unified Patents litigation data, and precisely the caveat already carried in the existing case summary.

In either scenario, the defendant(s), and therefore the defense roster, are unidentified. I did not locate a docket sheet, complaint, answer, corporate disclosure statement, Rule 7.1 statement, scheduling order, or opinion for 3:18-cv-11213 (D.N.J.), and nothing was surfaced from PACER, RECAP/CourtListener, Law360, or Reuters Legal. There is no basis to state that filings are sealed or that counsel "has not yet appeared" — the more accurate statement is that the case's existence as a '543 infringement action is unconfirmed, so counsel of record cannot be reported at all.

3. Verification steps before any counsel list can be built

To close this out properly, the following sequence is what I'd run, and none of it is a substitute for a PACER pull:

1. PACER docket report for 3:18-cv-11213 (D.N.J.) — confirm caption, filing date, cause of action code (830 = patent), and the "patent" flag on the cover sheet. This single step resolves the question.
2. RECAP/CourtListener search on the docket number for any free copy of the complaint's caption page.
3. D.N.J. CM/ECF party-name search to cross-check whether the case is, e.g., a Hatch-Waxman ANDA matter (which would explain a 2018 filing and would guarantee both NJ local counsel under L. Civ. R. 101.1(a) and out-of-state lead counsel).
4. Google Patents "Litigations" tab for US5073543 — pull each listed case and confirm whether the patent appears in a pleading's "patents at issue" section or only in a reference/citation list.
5. Unified Patents Portal and PTAB searches for the '543 patent's family to see whether any IPR/PGR exists, which would corroborate or rule out live assertion.

4. What I will not do

I won't populate the requested table — name, role, firm, office, notable matters — with plausible-sounding New Jersey patent litigators. Every field in that table would be fabricated. On the present record the accurate entry for each column is "unverified; no counsel identified."

If you can supply the caption or a PACER docket sheet for 3:18-cv-11213, I'll build the full counsel roster with roles, firms, offices, and case histories against the actual appearances.