FREMONT, Calif., – WaferGen Bio-systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: WGBS) announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued a Notice of Allowance for U.S. Patent Application 14/075,631, with both method and system claims to extract liquids containing single cell Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) libraries from multi-well arrays. With the allowance of this application, WaferGen now owns five total issued patents, and two allowed applications, that cover multiple key attributes of the Company’s technology.

This allowance significantly strengthens the claims of the core family of patents which support WaferGen’s products and applications. It enables the ability to uniquely extract discrete reactions performed in the nanowells. This step is a key differentiator which makes WaferGen’s technology very cost-effective and user-friendly by allowing the reactions from thousands of individual nanowells to be processed in a single tube.

The allowance provides a solid foundation for the recently launched ICELL8 Single-Cell System and existing SmartChip Target Enrichment systems. The ICELL8 Single-Cell System is a first of its kind system for processing thousands of single cells for downstream analysis, including NGS. The system has the potential to accelerate research in cancer, neuroscience, stem cells and immunology which could uncover discoveries leading to clinical single-cell applications. The SmartChip Target Enrichment System is currently used in multiple clinical research applications, such as detection of gene variations which affect responses to drugs and identification of mutation changes associated with multiple cancers, using NGS.

“The allowance of this patent protects a key step in WaferGen’s workflow and addresses a key challenge of recovering material from nanowells,” commented Maithreyan Srinivasan, CTO of WaferGen BioSystems. “Our additional filings of 20 U.S. and international patent applications related to single-cell analysis using the SmartChip technology, including single-cell capture, dispensing, counting, visualizing, and analysis, is expected to further bolster WaferGen’s position as a large-scale single cell analysis leader.”