Sabinsa has filed law suits in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey against four dietary supplement ingredient companies for selling products that infringe upon Sabinsa’s Curcumin C3 Complex® patent covering compositions, methods of use, and methods of extraction of a nutritional supplement in the US: Olive Lifesciences Pvt. Ltd. (Bangalore, India), their US distributor NutriBioLink LLC (Brooklyn, NY), Prakruti Products Pvt. Ltd. (Karnataka, India) and their US distributor HerbaKraft (Edison, NJ).
The issued U.S. Patent No. 5,861,415, titled “Bioprotectant Composition, Method of Use and Extraction Process of Curcuminoids,” was certainly not a secret, nor has been Sabinsa’s stated intent to protect the company’s intellectual property. “We are determined to protect our intellectual property even if it takes us to a court of law,” said Sabinsa founder Muhammed Majeed PhD. “We have been very outspoken in encouraging industry manufacturers to respect intellectual property; to do otherwise both stifles innovation and does a disservice to those manufacturers who legitimately license intellectual property. These Defendants’ customers are also infringing upon Sabinsa’s patents, most likely without their knowledge, so these infringing companies are putting their customer’s businesses at risk.”
"Sabinsa's patent claims the composition, methods of use, and methods of extraction of its Curcumin complex," stated James H. Hulme, attorney for Sabinsa. "Sabinsa will enforce its patent rights and protect its intellectual property to the fullest extent allowed by law," he explained.
Sabinsa’s patent means that while other companies can certainly sell a variety of curcumin products, they may not sell knock offs of Sabinsa’s unique composition ratio, nor market it for its antioxidant use, nor use the Ethyl Acetate extraction method developed by Sabinsa and outlined in Sabinsa’s patent.
The name C3 Complex refers to its’ three main chemical compounds, Curcumin, Demethoxycurcumin and Bisdemethoxycurcumin, collectively known as Curcuminoids. Curcumin C3 Complex® is a specific mixture of curcuminoids. It has been used in more clinical studies than any other curcumin product in the world.
