In an order issued last week, a bankruptcy court granted a motion by diagnostics firm Correlogic Systems to reject any and all licenses asserted by Korean drugmaker Ahn-Gook Pharmaceutical.
The motion is part of an ongoing legal dispute between the two firms that began in November 2010 when AGP sued Correlogic in US Bankruptcy Court in the District of Maryland, claiming that Correlogic had defaulted on a loan agreement between the two companies by making material misrepresentations regarding OvaCheck, its protein biomarker-based ovarian cancer diagnostic (PM 11/19/2010).
According to AGP's suit, the terms of the loan agreement call for Correlogic to grant AGP an exclusive license to "unconditionally use Correlogic's intellectual property, and any and all applications thereof, in Asia, including but not limited to Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Indonesia," in the event of default.
Upon AGP's filing of the suit, Correlogic CEO Peter Levine disputed AGP's charges, telling ProteoMonitor that they "are without foundation, baseless, and contrary to what AGP knows to be the truth." He also said that the company's counsel was looking into the possibility of filing a countersuit and suggested that AGP had undertaken the action in order to weaken Correlogic as it restructured under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which it entered in July 2010 (GWDN 7/23/2010).
In an e-mail to ProteoMonitor, Levine noted that, while the court's order is "nonetheless helpful," Correlogic maintains that AGP "does not have a license to anything."
The dispute is scheduled to go to trial on Feb. 16.