AntiOp, Inc.

Let me get more detail on the company's founding, ownership, and the nature of the case.

AntiOp, Inc. is a private, development-stage specialty pharmaceutical company based in Lexington, Kentucky. It was founded in 2009 by Dr. Daniel Wermeling, a professor of pharmacy at the University of Kentucky, and is not publicly traded. Public sources do not disclose employee counts or revenue; the company is a small startup whose development work has been funded largely by grants — including roughly $3 million over three years from NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse (total federal and state grant funding reported above $5 million), plus support from the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation and the Kentucky Economic Development Cabinet. It has no disclosed parent company.

The company's core program is a single-dose, disposable intranasal naloxone spray for suspected opioid overdose — a concentrated naloxone formulation paired with an existing nasal spray device. AntiOp filed an IND in 2012, received FDA Fast Track designation in July 2014, and was issued a U.S. formulation patent in November 2015. In May 2014 it signed a Development Agreement with Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals (now Indivior PLC), which obtained exclusive rights and an option to acquire the product upon FDA approval. There is no public evidence AntiOp ever commercialized a product itself; the first approved nasal naloxone products were brought to market by other firms.

Litigation posture: AntiOp appears once in the tracked data, as plaintiff and never as defendant — but the tracked matter is a breach-of-contract action, not a patent-infringement suit. Docketed under 28 U.S.C. §1332 diversity jurisdiction in the Eastern District of Kentucky (5:16-cv-00051), it reflects a development-stage operating company enforcing a licensing agreement, not an NPE asserting an acquired portfolio. Nothing links AntiOp to high-volume patent assertion or to plaintiff-friendly venues such as the Eastern District of Texas.

Notable case: AntiOp, Inc. v. Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, Inc., et al. (E.D. Ky.), against Reckitt, Indivior PLC, and Indivior Inc. AntiOp sought a $3 million milestone payment under Section 2.07 of the Development Agreement, arguing it had satisfied the conditions; defendants contended the required patent claims were not Orange Book-listable. In July 2016 Judge Joseph M. Hood denied the defendants' motion to dismiss, holding the agreement's forum-selection clause permissive and allowing the case to proceed in Kentucky. Post-2016 outcomes are not verifiable from the sources reviewed.