Complete Genomics Wins Partial Summary Judgment in Illumina Suit
The suit concerns three patents, but the motion addressed only one. The court ruled that the inventor, Dr. Stephen Macevicz, “did not act with reasonable diligence in pursuing his patent application” and that the “Southern” patent—PCT Application No. WP 95/04160, entitled ”Tag Reagent and Assay Method”—is prior art. The court also held that “Southern” and “Brenner” made the two claims of the patent obvious. “Brenner” is US Patent No. 5,552,278, entitled “DNA Sequencing by Stepwise Ligation and Cleavage.”
Mountain View, CA 10/18/12; San Diego, CA 10/18/12—Sequencing services firm Complete Genomics has announced that the US District Court for the Northern District of California issued an order granting its motion for partial summary judgment of invalidity in a patent infringement suit brought by Illumina against the company (see IBO 9/3010). Judge Elizabeth D. Laporte declared that claim 1 and dependent claims 9, 10 and 14–19 of Illumina’s US Patent No. 6,306,587, entitled “Template-directed Photoligation,” invalid due to prior art. Complete Genomics stated that the only remaining allegation of the suit was infringement of Claims 2, 4 and 5. Commenting on the ruling, Illumina President and CEO Jay Flatley said, “We strongly disagree that any of the claims of our patent are invalid, and we intend to appeal the Court’s ruling. We believe that this patent covers important and novel inventions that Complete Genomics has misappropriated.” Illumina recently filed another suit against Complete Genomics (see page 1).
