BioCentury
ARTICLE | Company News

Sequenom, Verinata diagnostic news

March 5, 2012 8:00 AM UTC

Verinata said it filed suit against Sequenom in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California seeking declaratory judgment that Verinata's cell-free DNA sequencing analysis techniques used in its verifi prenatal test do not infringe Sequenom's U.S. Patent No. 6,258,540. The patent covers prenatal diagnosis using nucleic acid analysis used in Sequenom's MaterniT21 Plus laboratory-developed test (LDT) to detect fetal trisomies 13, 18 and 21.

The suit also claims the '540 patent is invalid because the prior art establishes that "the claims are old and obvious." Verinata said last month that it planned to launch the verifi prenatal test, a non-invasive prenatal test utilizing massively parallel DNA sequencing, for the detection of Down syndrome, Edwards syndrome and Patau syndrome from maternal blood samples on March 1 (see BioCentury, Feb. 20). ...