Tue 12th February 2019
– Decision defeats attempts by PacBio to prevent Oxford Nanopore from selling its technology in the US –
Oxford Nanopore announces that the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit today upheld the decision of the International Trade Commission (ITC) in favour of Oxford Nanopore. In a complaint previously filed by Pacific Biosciences, the ITC had previously ruled that the patents being asserted against Oxford Nanopore with claims directed towards a method of single molecule sequencing were limited to template-dependent synthesis.
The decision was also consistent with a recent decision by the European Patent Office to revoke Pacific Biosciences’ patent EP3045542 with claims to a single molecule sequencing process.
“Pacific Biosciences has not succeeded in its strategy to try to prevent us from selling our real-time, direct sequencing technology, that can provide a full range of solutions from field-based sequencing to terabases of ultra long reads in a lab,” said Gordon Sanghera, CEO.
The court issued a Rule 36 judgement, which is a unanimous confirmance of the ITC findings.