A European Patent Office board of appeal said in a ruling published on March 10th that Roche Diagnostics GmbH proved Verinata Health Inc.’s blueprint lacks an inventive step over an earlier international patent application setting out a similar way of testing “free-floating DNA” in a pregnant individual’s blood.
The panel ruled that a skilled person would have seen computer processor implementation for fetal DNA analysis as an obvious improvement, making Verinata’s invention not inventive enough.
This is not the first legal setback for Illumina in genetic testing. The company had previously lost patents related to DNA sequencing techniques and was involved in other legal disputes.
“Illumina has an extensive patent portfolio in noninvasive prenatal testing technology consisting of hundreds of patents, while Illumina respectfully disagrees with the decision of the Technical Board of Appeal, this patent is not a material part of the portfolio.” told a company spokesperson
Roche was represented by Maiwald.
This text is a summary of an article published by Law360. The full text of the article is available here.
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