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Vermillion Closes Settlement Debt with HDC

By a GenomeWeb staff reporter

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Health Discovery Corp. today said that it has received the final payment owed to it by Vermillion under a patent infringement lawsuit.

The companies agreed to a $600,000 settlement in 2007, when Vermillion was still operating as Ciphergen Biosystems, that would give Ciphergen a limited license to use HDC's support vector machine technology for discovering biomarkers for ovarian cancer in exchange for the settlement fee. That agreement gave Vermillion two years to pay off the fee.

Vermillion, which very recently emerged from bankruptcy protection, used the SVM technology to develop its OVA1 test, which received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration in September 2009.

The settlement did not give Vermillion the rights to use the technology for gene-based molecular diagnostic discovery, digital pathway interpretations, digital radiology interpretation, or other uses beyond the "very narrow field" of SELDI-based protein discovery, according to HDC.

HDC CEO and Chairman Stephen Barnhill said that the firm will continue to develop and use its SVM technology for licensing opportunities within and outside of the healthcare field, including high-tech applications such as Internet search engines, fraud detection, security and surveillance, and electronic health records.

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