NEW YORK ─ The US District Court for the Southern District of California denied Quidel's request for damages in a false advertising lawsuit it had filed against Siemens Healthineers, according to a document filed with the court on Monday.
Quidel originally sued Erlangen, Germany-based Siemens Healthineers in December 2016 claiming false advertising and unfair competition associated with competing assays that measure thyroid-stimulating immunoglobins to detect Graves' disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes hyperthyroidism. At the time, Quidel's lawsuit was filed against Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics and Siemens Medical Solutions that later, along with Siemens Medical Systems, became Siemens Healthineers.
According to the court document, "Quidel has not produced any evidence that [it] has suffered damages … as a result of Siemens' allegedly false advertising."
The lawsuit was related to two types of assays ─ TSH receptor antibody (TRAb) and thyroid-stimulating immunoglobin (TSI) that detect Graves' disease. TRAb assays detect both thyroid-stimulating immunoglobins (TSI) and thyroid blocking immunoglobins (TBI), while TSI assays detect thyroid-stimulating immunoglobins only.
"The crux of this matter lies in Siemens' advertising of Immulite," Siemens' Graves' disease test, the court document said. "In Quidel's opinion, Immulite 'measures the binding of antibodies to the TSH receptor without discrimination,' meaning it does not distinguish between stimulating [and] blocking antibodies. However, Siemens advertised Immulite as a 'TSI only' assay … that does distinguish between stimulating and blocking antibodies."
In its original complaint, San Diego-based Quidel said its own assay, called the Thyretain TSI Reporter BioAssay, is the only commercially available assay that detects TSI, "as opposed to both thyroid-stimulating and thyroid-blocking immunoglobins."
The court, in its conclusion, stated that "Quidel is not entitled to a presumption of injury."