NEW YORK – Biomodal announced Tuesday that it has sued New England Biolabs for allegedly infringing on eight patents covering aspects of Biomodal's evoC sequencing technology.
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, seeks damages and an injunction against NEB from making, selling, using, or offering for sale all NEBNext Enzymatic 5hmC-seq products, as well as NEBNext Enzymatic Methyl-seq products in clinical markets. It also asks for an injunction on otherwise infringing on patents exclusively licensed by Biomodal from Boston Children's Hospital through the Children's Medical Center Corp.
The eight patents all cover inventions of Anjana Rao, currently a professor of immunotherapy at La Jolla Institute for Immunology and a member of Biomodal's scientific advisory board. The patents relate to inter alia uses of ten-eleven translocation (TET) enzymes used to detect methylation and/or hydroxymethylation, as well as all uses of DNA beta-glucosyltransferase enzymes in methods to detect methylation and/or hydroxymethylation.
Cambridge, UK-based Biomodal said that it has exclusively licensed these methods and uses them in its Duet Multiomics Solution evoC product, which enables single-base resolution sequencing of the four standard DNA bases, 5-methylcytosine (5mC), and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) from the same DNA molecule and in the same workflow.
The patents also cover methods used in Biomodal's Duet Multiomics Solution +modC product, used to determine modified cytosines without distinguishing between 5mC and 5hmC.
"Biomodal has made significant investments to bring our novel Duet platform to market through both our Duet evoC and +modC offerings," Biomodal CEO Peter Fromen said in a statement. "As a company with innovation at its core, we strongly believe in the role of intellectual property in our industry, and we will act vigorously to protect our IP rights and our customers' ability to apply differentiated solutions that deliver best-in-class results."