BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

Jarndyce lives

June 14, 1999 7:00 AM UTC

If the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce was sufficiently convoluted to keep Charles Dickens occupied for almost a thousand pages of Bleak House, the newly initiated legal wrangling between tiny Oxford Gene Technology Ltd. and Affymetrix Inc. is already so confusing that it requires a scorecard to tell the players.

Earlier this month, Oxford Gene (Oxford, U.K.) filed a patent infringement suit against AFFX (Santa Clara, Calif.) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware and in the English High Court in the U.K. The British company alleges that AFFX infringes its U.S. Patent No. 5,700,637 claiming a device and method for analyzing a known or unknown polynucleotide sequence involving a support, such as a glass slide, that carries an array of oligonucleotides...