By Diagnostics World Staff
January 26, 2018 | Illumina has won a patent infringement lawsuit against Roche's Ariosa Diagnostics related to the companies' non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT). A jury in the US District Court of the Northern District of California awarded Illumina $26.7 million in damages.
According to the lawsuit, Ariosa, which Roche acquired in 2014, infringed on two patents originally held by Verinata Health, which Illumina acquired in 2013: US Patent No. 8,318,430 entitled “Methods of Fetal Abnormality Detection” and US Patent No. 7,955,794 entitled “Multiplex Nucleic Acid Reactions.”
Illumina and Ariosa compete in the growing market for non-invasive prenatal tests, which screen for chromosomal conditions like Down syndrome.
Illumina had sought more than $100 million in damages.
In the original lawsuit, filed in 2014, Illumina claimed that its “Multiplex Nucleic Acid Reactions” patent covered multiplexing methods for amplifying and genotyping samples simultaneously, and that Ariosa's test, which at the time was based on targeted sequencing, infringed because it enabled “simultaneous quantification of hundreds of DNA loci.” In that suit, Illumina also claimed that Ariosa infringed on the “Methods of Fetal Abnormality Detection” patent.
Illumina filed a second suit in 2015 after Roche had acquired Ariosa and converted its NIPT to run on a microarray. Illumina argued that the microarray version of the test also infringed on its '794 patent because it used the same technique as the sequencing-based test.
A jury sided with Illumina, agreeing that both Ariosa's sequencing-based and microarray-based tests most likely infringed on five claims in the '794 patent. The jury also agreed that the sequencing version of Ariosa's test infringed on three claims in the '430 patent.
The jury rejected a counterclaim by Ariosa that Illumina had breached a contract between the companies by bringing the lawsuit. Ariosa had sought $88 million in damages from Illumina on that counterclaim.