Venlo, the Netherlands and Hilden, Germany 9/10/16; San Francisco, CA 9/9/16–The US District Court for the Northern District of California has granted Illumina’s motion for a preliminary injunction barring the sale of QIAGEN’s GeneReader NGS System and related products in the US. The ruling stems from a patent infringement suit brought in May by Illumina against QIAGEN and Intelligent Bio-Systems (IBS), which QIAGEN acquired in 2012 (see IBO 6/30/12). The suit alleges that the GeneReader infringes US Patent No. 7,566,537 (Labeled Nucleotides), which is exclusively licensed to Illumina. “While we are disappointed and disagree with the Court’s decision, we believe our intellectual property position in next-generation sequencing is strong, and we are pursuing all legal means to get the current decision reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as soon as possible,” stated QIAGEN CEO Peer M. Schatz. “The disputed intellectual property claim is related to a narrow step within the overall broad GeneReader NGS workflow. In addition, QIAGEN intends to accelerate the development already underway of an upgrade to the component under dispute to resume U.S. commercialization with a full workflow of at least comparable or even better performance.” QIAGEN stated that it expects no meaningful revenue contributions from the system this year. A trial date is scheduled for November 2017.

The ruling gives QIAGEN 21 days to notify US users of the GeneReader and related products, such as the GeneRead Sequencing Q Kit, of the decision. In accordance with QIAGEN’s request, the court also ordered Illumina to post a $20 million bond as security for the injunction. The companies’ dispute dates back to 2012 when IBS and Columbia University sued Illumina for infringement (see IBO 4/30/12), and Illumina counterclaimed for infringement of ‘537. An inter partes review of the patent, initiated by IBS, ruled in 2015 that the patent was valid. In May, the Federal Circuit US Court of Appeals upheld the decision, paving the way for the current Illumina suit.