U.S. Patent 7794475 was awarded to Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc. on 2010-09-14 and describes a “Surgical staples having compressible or crushable members for securing tissue therein and stapling instruments for deploying the same.” This patent has been cited 495 times by other U.S. patents which places it in the top 500 cited patents since 2010 according to our law firm research, and makes it of the most innovative medical technology patents in the field of instruments. The abstract states:

A staple having a crown, a deformable leg extending from the crown, and a spring extending from the crown configured to compress tissue between the spring and the deformable member. Owing to the flexibility of the spring, the staple can accommodate a wide range of tissue thicknesses while still compressing the tissue captured therein. As a result, a single staple design can be used in a wide variety of surgical procedures thereby reducing the amount of staple designs that must be provided to the surgeon. In at least one embodiment, the staple includes a crushable member. This crushable member can include a plastically deformable first portion and an elastically deformable second portion. The present invention can also include, in various embodiments, a crown, a first deformable member extending from the crown, and means for compressing the tissue against the first deformable member. Link: U.S. Patent 7794475

This patent was originally filed on 2006-09-29 which gives it a processing time of 1446 days, compared to an average processing time of 1933 in the field. Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc. has 2128 total patents. The first named inventor is James W. Voegele of Cincinnati, OH. The assistant examiner was Son Dang.

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