Menlo Park, CA 5/8/18—Long-read sequencer maker Pacific Biosciences has entered into a five-year settlement agreement with Oxford Nanopore and other parties, ending the company’s patent infringement suits in the UK and Germany. Under the settlement, Oxford Nanopore will not offer its “2D” sequencing products in the UK and Germany through 2023. In return, Pacific Biosciences has agreed not to assert EP Patent Nos. 3,045,542 and 3,170,904 against Oxford Nanopore in the UK and Germany during the same period.

However, Pacific Biosciences has the right to assert the patents in the UK and Germany after 2023. “From the beginning, our goal with the UK and German actions was to enforce and protect our intellectual property estate, specifically with regard to Oxford Nanopore’s ‘2D’ products, which utilize PacBio’s single-molecule consensus sequencing technology, and which Oxford Nanopore discontinued soon after we initiated the litigation,” stated Pacific Biosciences CEO Dr. Michael W. Hunkapiller.

A US patent suit regarding this same patent family (Compositions and Methods for Nucleic Acid Sequencing) continues in US federal court. Pacific Biosciences is currently appealing a decision earlier this year by the US International Trade Commission in a filing against Oxford Nanopore regarding the same patent family (see IBO 2/15/18).

In addition, Pacific Biosciences has a patent suit pending in US federal court against Oxford Nanopore regarding different patents (see IBO 5/15/17). Likewise, Nanopore and Harvard University have filed patent cases in the UK and Germany against Pacific Biosciences concerning two separate patents held by Harvard University.