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Illumina suing Oxford Nanopore

February 25, 2016 1:07 AM UTC

Illumina Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) filed two concurrent lawsuits against nanopore-based sequencing company Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. (Oxford, U.K.) alleging that Oxford Nanopore's MinION and PromethION devices infringe patents to which Illumina has exclusive rights.

Illumina is alleging that MinION and PromethION infringe on U.S. Patents Nos. 8,673,550 and 9,170,230, which cover the use of Mycobacterium smegmatis porin A (MspA) as the basis for a protein nanopore sequencing system. Illumina has exclusive rights to the patents in the field of nucleic acid sequencing from the UAB Research Foundation, which managed IP for the University of Alabama at Birmingham (Birmingham, Ala.), and the University of Washington (Seattle, Wash.). ...