More than three years into a lawsuit accusing competitor Natera of disparaging its cancer blood test, Guardant Health has emerged victorious.
As both companies reported Monday, a federal jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in favor of Guardant in the case, which dates back to May 2021.
The jury awarded a total of $292.5 million to Guardant, representing what the company described as “one of the largest false advertising verdicts in history.” Meanwhile, the jury reportedly rejected all of Natera’s counterclaims against Guardant in the case.
In a statement Monday, Natera said, “We disagree with this decision and will ask the Court to overturn it.”
The case centered around Reveal and Signatera, Guardant and Natera’s respective blood tests for the detection of trace amounts of cancer—and, specifically, the colorectal cancer versions of each test.
In its original 2021 complaint, Guardant accused Natera of having “undertaken a campaign of misinformation” to convince patients, doctors, researchers, labs and other potential customers to use the Signatera test rather than Reveal.
“In its commercial advertising and promotion, Natera makes literally false and misleading statements that disparage Guardant’s new assay, and falsely asserts that Signatera is superior to Reveal across a variety of metrics, including sensitivity, failure rate, negative predictive value (NPV), and Hazard Ratio, among other categories,” the company wrote. “These claims are false.”
Guardant claimed that Natera’s alleged false advertising combined “outright misrepresentations with scientifically unfounded comparisons based on cherry-picked metrics, data artifacts, and noncomparable clinical studies to exaggerate the purported benefits of Signatera while inaccurately denigrating Reveal.”
Instead, Guardant claimed, “Reveal has important clinical advantages over Signatera—including its superior landmark sensitivity, its availability for patients from whom tumor samples are unavailable, and its faster initial turnaround time from sample collection to assay results—all of which Natera ignores.”
Natera, for its part, denied those allegations and countered that it was in fact Guardant that had embarked upon a “campaign of false and misleading commercial statements regarding the performance of its purportedly competitive MRD product, ‘Reveal.’”
Natera accused Guardant of having backed a study “that it grossly mischaracterized and misrepresented in order to enhance the performance claims for its test,” allegedly with an aim of convincing customers to choose Reveal over competing colon cancer tests, including Signatera.
“Even prior to the publication of the Study, Guardant began spreading false and misleading information, allegedly based on the Study, to drive market share away from competitors such as Natera,” the company wrote in its countersuit. “Guardant’s false and misleading statements about the performance of its [minimal residual disease] test have caused and—unless enjoined—will continue to cause significant injury to Natera, and potentially to cancer patients.”
The jury’s finding in favor of Guardant includes the allotment of $175.5 million in punitive damages.
As Natera seeks to reverse the ruling, Guardant was much more enthusiastic about the outcome.
“Today’s unanimous verdict holding Natera responsible for engaging in illegal and anticompetitive conduct represents a major victory for CRC patients who could benefit from our groundbreaking Reveal test, and we thank the jury and the Court for their careful consideration of our claims,” John Saia, Guardant’s chief legal officer, said in the company’s announcement Monday.
“Every company in the cancer diagnostics space has a duty to prioritize patients above all else,” he continued. “In keeping with our mission to help cancer patients lead longer and healthier lives, we strongly believe it is vital that clinicians receive accurate, complete, and truthful information to inform their decisions about potentially life-saving patient treatments.”