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BioReference Labs Acquires US Ariosa Lab NIPT Business From Roche

NEW YORK – Opko subsidiary BioReference Laboratories announced on Monday that it has acquired the US Ariosa centralized lab prenatal testing business from Roche.

Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Ariosa's noninvasive prenatal screening test, the Harmony Prenatal Test, has been performed in more than 1.5 million patients. The acquisition will complement BioReference's specialty health division GenPath, which currently offers the ClariTest Core. Both tests use the same core technology, BioReference said in a statement.

"Acquiring the US Ariosa centralized laboratory prenatal testing business allows us to expand our [noninvasive prenatal screening] offerings and further underscores our commitment to prenatal screening," Jon Cohen, executive chairman of BioReference, said in a statement.

In May, Ariosa and Illumina settled a long-running patent dispute across four cases over sequencing-related methods used in NIPT that began when Verinata Health filed suit against Ariosa in 2012. Verinata was then acquired by Illuminawhich sued in 2014 and 2015 for patent infringement. Ariosa countersued for non-infringement, invalidity of the patents, breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and breach of contract.

In 2018, a jury awarded Illumina $26.7 million in damages for the 2014 lawsuit, which the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed in 2020.

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