Amersham is Granted Favorable Ruling Over PE

FOSTER CITY, Calif.--Nycomed Amersham last week said its life science unit, Amersham Pharma-cia Biotech, was granted two favorable rulings by a California District Court in its intellectual property action against PE Biosys-tems. The lawsuit relates to use of energy transfer dyes that are used to enable high throughput DNA sequencing. Amersham, which licenses rights to US Patent No. 5,688,648 from the University of California, Berkeley, anticipated that the case would come to trial in January 2001. PE Biosystems contended that Amersham’s claims are invalid because of prior technical work published by others. PE also has a suit against Amersham relating to Amersham’s MegaBACE DNA sequencing instrument.