Illumina, Roche accused of infringing genetic testing patents
Pharmaceutical companies Illumina and Roche have been sued for allegedly infringing two patents covering the technology for non-invasive DNA testing by Maryland genetic testing company Ravgen.
The complaints, filed at the the US District Court for the District of Delaware on December 3, hold that the companies infringed US patent numbers 7,727,720 and 7,332,277, which protect an invention used to perform non-invasive tests of “cell-free” fetal DNA circulating in maternal blood to detect chromosomal abnormalities.
Ravgen stated that its founder, Ravinder Dhallan, started the company in 2000 after discovering limitations to the available techniques for prenatal testing, “making it his mission to invent an improved prenatal diagnostic exam—one that was both non-invasive and accurate”.
It said that Dhallan’s innovative new methods for detecting genetic disorders had laid the foundation for the development of accurate non-invasive prenatal diagnostic tests, and that his publications exploring these inventions had received worldwide press coverage.
According to the complaint filed against Illumina and its subsidiary, Verinata Health, the accused companies make, use, and commercialise genetic tests using cell-free DNA, under the trademarks: ‘TruSight’, ‘Verifi’, and ‘VeriSeq’, which infringe the claimed inventions of Ravgen’s patents.
It added that the companies had been and are assignees of a number of patents and patent applications that were filed after the ‘277 and ‘720 patents were published in 2008 and 2010 respectively, and that, in researching the patentability of their own patents, they would, or at a minimum should have, become aware of Ravgen’s patents.
In the suit filed against Roche and its subsidiary, Ariosa, Ravgen accused the companies of infringing its patents by marketing and distributing genetic tests under the trademarks: ‘Harmony Prenatal Test’,‘FoundationACT’, ‘Foundation One Liquid’, and ‘FoundationOne Liquid CDx’.
Both complaints said that despite their knowledge of the patents-in-suit and of their infringement of those patents, that Illumina and Roche “continued to willfully infringe the patents-in-suit so as to obtain the significant benefits of Ravgen’s innovations without paying compensation to Ravgen”.
Ravgen also sued Natera, PerkinElmer, and LabCorp for infringing the same patents with their DNA tests at the US District Court for the Western District of Texas in June.
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