Imaging AI vendor Heartflow sues competitor over alleged patent infringement
Imaging artificial intelligence vendor Heartflow on Monday announced it is suing a competitor over alleged patent infringement.
The Mountain View, California-based company—which creates personalized models of the heart from CT scans—is taking rival Cleerly to court. Heartflow’s lawsuit is seeking permanent injunctive relief, requiring Cleerly to cease such infringement, along with unspecified monetary damages.
The imaging AI vendor asserts that Cleerly’s Ischemia, Plaque Analysis and Compare products infringe on six of Heartflow’s patents, with priority dates from 2012 to 2018. Founded in 1995, Heartflow charges that its CT analysis offerings were developed years before Cleerly’s, with the Denver-based competitor later launching in 2017.
Heartflow’s technology has now impacted over 600,000 patient lives, and the company has raised approximately $1.2 billion in investor funding since its inception.
“Our team has worked tirelessly since 2010 to develop the Heartflow Platform, a first-of-its-kind AI solution that has been used to detect and manage coronary artery disease,” CEO John Farquhar, MBA, said in a statement April 13. “We take seriously our responsibility to protect the intellectual property that supports this field and the clinicians and patients it serves,” he added.
Cleerly, which was founded by cardiologist and former Weill Cornell radiology professor James K. Min, MD, refuted the claims on Monday. The company, who says its mission is to “create a world without heart attacks,” has raised $578 million to date including a $106 million Series C funding round in 2024.
“We are confident in our extensive and well-established intellectual property portfolio and the originality of our technology,” Min told Radiology Business April 13. “Cleerly has published landmark clinical science that has redefined how cardiovascular disease is understood and treated, which has formed the basis of our novel technologies that provide physicians with actionable insights into their patients’ heart health.”
Heartflow is backed by Bain Capital and was valued at $2.27 billion at the time of its debut on the Nasdaq in August (HTFL). Dr. Min purportedly worked as a consultant to Heartflow from 2012 to 2017, according to the complaint, filed in a Texas federal court. Heartflow charges that the physician secretly created Cleerly while he was still working for it in 2017.
Cleerly also later hired Brent Ness, Heartflow’s former chief commercial officer, to have him serve in the same title. He acted as CCO for Cleerly from 2019 to 2021, allegedly bringing “intimate knowledge” of Heartflow’s technology, patents, commercial strategies and competitive knowledge with him.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.