Masimo Corp. (Nasdaq: MASI), an Irvine-based medical device maker, said it won a ruling against a former employee who took trade secrets to Apple Inc.
The United States District Court for the Central District of California ruled that Marcelo Lamego, who served as chief technical officer at Cercacor, a Masimo spinoff that owns certain license rights to many Masimo patents, misappropriated trade secrets related to Masimo’s pulse oximetry technology. Lamego left Cercacor in 2014 to work at Apple and later launched his own company, True Wearables, which created a wireless, wearable pulse oximeter device.
“In the ruling, the District Court found that Dr. Lamego stole multiple Masimo trade secrets, breached his fiduciary duty of loyalty to Cercacor, and violated his employment agreements by keeping confidential information and documents,” Masimo said in a statement.
The Court ordered Lamego to abandon at least 12 patent applications containing Masimo’s trade secrets and to return all confidential information and documents. The Court has also permanently enjoined the sale of the True Wearables pulse oximeter because the Masimo trade secrets were foundational to its health-sensing features.
Masimo has a separate lawsuit pending against Apple, which is currently set for trial in March, alleging that Apple, through Lamego and other former Masimo employees, misappropriated Masimo’s trade secrets in developing certain physiological monitoring features of the Apple Watch.
Shares of Masimo rose 3.8% to $137.43 and a $7.2 billion market cap.
