NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Genetic Technologies has filed four separate lawsuits claiming infringement of a patent covering its non-coding DNA technology.
Its case against Genesis Genetics Institute was filed in US District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division on Sept. 13. In separate cases, it also sued Reprogenetics and Medical Diagnostic Laboratories in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey on Sept. 26, and it sued IVF Institute in the US District Court for the District of Eastern Virginia.
Court documents for the IVF lawsuit were not yet available online, but in the other three cases GTG is alleging infringement of US Patent No. 5,612,179 titled "Intron sequence analysis method for detection of adjacent and remote locus alleles as haplotypes," which was assigned by an entity called Genetype AG to GTG. The patent was originally assigned by the technology's inventor Malcolm Simons.
The patent is at the center of a series of lawsuits that Melbourne, Australia-based GTG has directed at numerous companies including Agilent Technologies; Bristol-Myers Squibb; Hologic; Navigenics; Pfizer; and 454 Life Sciences, as well as Beckman Coulter and Gen-Probe, now part of Hologic. Some of the earlier litigation has been settled, and since it filed its lawsuit against Beckman Coulter, now a Danaher company, in early 2010 it has secured more than $15 million in licensing revenues, GTG said.
In August, GTG sued Reproductive Genetics Institute claiming the Chicago-based firm infringes the '179 patent.