San Diego, CA 3/13/07; Santa Clara, CA 3/13/07; San Diego, CA 3/1/07—A jury from the US District Court for the District of Delaware decided that Illumina infringed on, and induced infringement on, claims of five Affymetrix patents. The jury determined a proper royalty rate of 15% and awarded $16.7 million in damages to Affymetrix for the period between 2002 and 2005. Jay Flatley, CEO of Illumina, stated, “We disagree with and plan to appeal the present finding of infringement in this lawsuit, and note that this finding was made without consideration of the validity and enforceability of any of the patents asserted by Affymetrix. That infringement finding is therefore preliminary.” There will be two more phases in this trial; the next phase, scheduled for this summer, will focus on whether Illumina’s infringement was willful and will weigh the merits of Illumina’s defense that Affymetrix’s patents are invalid. In a separate matter, Illumina announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has declared a patent interference between an Illumina patent application and US Patent No. 6,858,412 (“Direct multiplex characterization of genomic DNA”), a Stanford University patent, whose rights are exclusively licensed to Affymetrix’s ParAllele Bioscience business (see IBO 6/15/05).