UPC’s Hague LD grants Abbott two preliminary injunctions, assumes long-arm jurisdiction (Spain) over German defendants, clarifies urgency requirement

Context:

• Continuous glucose monitoring (GCM) market leader Abbott Diabetes Care has already won various Unified Patent Court (UPC) injunctions (e.g., October 17, 2025 ip fray article).
• As we wrote earlier today, the UPC’s Court of Appeal (CoA) gets to clarify certain aspects of BSH long-arm jurisdiction at and after two hearings next month.

What’s new: The UPC’s Hague Local Division (LD) has just granted Abbott provisional measures (preliminary injunctions (PIs)) over two different patents against MicroTech, SenEaron Healthcare, Lotus NL, Medeco, and Mediq. The patents-in-suit are EP2720610 (“Stacked analyte sensor having a first electrode narrower than a second electrode of the sensor”) and EP3960072 (“Compact on-body physiological monitoring devices and methods thereof”). The PIs cover all 18 UPC contracting member states as well as Spain. The court clarified that even if a defendant is based in Germany (another UPC contracting member state), the Hague LD has long-arm jurisdiction with respect to Spain. That holding validates a view expressed by ip fray at last month’s Patent Litigation Europe event in Amsterdam (January 19, 2026 ip fray article). Furthermore, the decision clarifies that under the specific circumstances of this case, the PI requests were timely even though filed 2.5 months after the start of the infringement analysis.

Direct impact: The defendants can appeal and seek an enforcement stay, but the hurdle for that is high in the UPC.

Wider ramifications: This “double whammy” cements the UPC’s position as the leading patent PI jurisdiction.