Hercules, CA 11/14/18—Bio-Rad Laboratories, a provider of products for the life science research and clinical diagnostic markets, has announced that a District Court jury has ruled in its favor in a patent infringement suit against 10x Genomics. The patents are held by the University of Chicago and exclusively licensed to Bio-Rad. The jury awarded Bio-Rad $23.9 million in damages, finding that 10x’s Single Cell and Linked-Read genomics products willfully infringed. “BioRad remains committed to growing and protecting its portfolio of patents in the droplet microfluidics space and to delivering differentiated genomics technologies that enable world class research,” stated Bio-Rad President and CEO Norman Schwartz.

The 2015 suit (see IBO 4/30/15) involved US Patent Nos. 8.889,083 (Device and Method for Pressure-driven Plug Transport and Reaction), 8,304,193 (Method for Conducting an Autocatalytic Reaction in Plugs in a Microfluidic System) and 8,329,407 (Method for Conducting Reactions Involving Biological Molecules in Plugs in a Microfluidic System). The original plaintiff was RainDance Technologies, which Bio-Rad later acquired (see IBO 1/31/17).

The companies also have two other cases pending in District Court (see IBO 11/15/17 and IBO 5/31/18) as well as interpartes review proceeding at the US Trade and Patent Office. Last month, Bio-Rad Laboratories filed another suit against 10x Genomics alleging infringement of US Patent Nos. 9,562,837 (Systems for Handling Microfluidic Droplets) and 9,896,722 (System For Handling Microfluidic Droplets), which were also RainDance Technologies’ patents, by 10x’s Chromium and GemCode systems and reagents.