PTAB blocks Qiagen’s bid to invalidate diagnostics patent
Biotechnology company Qiagen has failed in its bid to stop diagnostics company HandyLab from retaining a patent for a diagnostic system, according to a decision issued by the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board on Tuesday, July 14.
The dispute over the patent arose from issues that resulted following the takeover of HandyLab by Becton, Dickinson & Co (BD) in 2009 .
In 2012, former HandyLab chief executive Jeffrey Williams founded Molecular Systems, which became NeuMoDx, while HandyLab co-founder Sundaresh Brahmasandra then joined the company as president.
In August 2019, NeuMoDx filed a response at the US District of Delaware court defending itself against a claim by BD that it had infringed certain patents acquired during the takeover.
Qiagen, which acquired NeuMoDX in 2018, also claimed the PTAB should never have granted six patents to Handylab before it was acquired by BD.
The company argued that Handylab’s ‘708 patent for its system and related methods for amplifying, and carrying out diagnostic analyses on, polynucleotides from biological samples, are unpatentable as obvious over prior art.
Following the hearing, however, the PTAB stated that to demonstrate that the patent is unpatentable, Qiagen must show “that a skilled artisan would have been motivated to combine the teachings of the prior art references to achieve the claimed invention”, and that “the skilled artisan would have had a reasonable expectation of success in doing so”.
The PTAB ruled that Quiagen had failed to prove this by showing “a preponderance of the evidence that the patent in dispute was unpatentable”.