Oxford, UK 1/22/19—Oxford Nanopore has announced that the European Patent Office (EPO) has revoked Pacific Biosciences’ European Patent No. 3,045,542, whose validity Oxford Nanopore had disputed. Oxford Nanopore stated, “The EPO ruled that the claims to a single-molecule sequencing process were unsupported in the application and that the application only supported a template-directed synthesis sequencing method. As Pacific Biosciences were unwilling to accept this change, the patent was revoked.”

Last year, the companies reached an agreement in the UK and Germany involving this patent, entitled “Methods for Nucleic Acid Sequencing,” and another patent (see IBO 5/15/18) that limited sales of some Oxford Nanopore products.