NEW YORK – BioSpyder Technologies on Wednesday filed a civil action in US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking a declaratory judgement that the firm's TempO-Seq gene expression profiling assay does not infringe a patent held by HTG Molecular Diagnostics.
BioSpyder's actions relates to US Patent No. 8,741,564 held by HTG covering a quantitative nuclease protection assay (QNPA) and sequencing (QNPS) improvements.
The Carlsbad, California-startup firm said that HTG has repeatedly and baselessly asserted that BioSpyder has infringed the '564 patent.
Biospyder's TempoSeq is a targeted RNA sequencing technology that involves barcoding and sequencing short fragments of each transcript in order to pool thousands of samples into one sequencing run.
HTG has been developing a whole-transcriptome product at its San Carlos, California based lab, which the firm believes will serve as a surrogate for full transcriptome RNA-Seq for gene expression.
To counter HTG's allegations of patent infringement, BioSpyder said that it has filed the declaratory judgement action to vindicate the firm and its technology.
"Since our founding in 2011, BioSpyder has respected the intellectual property of those who have blazed a trial before us," Joel McComb, CEO of BioSpyder, said in a statement. "We view the actions of HTG as reckless and baseless, and with this action are putting HTG on notice that we will vigorously defend our premier technology and intellectual property.
"We believe our patents are strong, and we intend to vigorously enforce them just as any other IP-centric company would do," John Lubniewski, president and CEO of HTG, said in a statement. "We had previously offered the possibility of arriving at a negotiated settlement that recognizes our patent rights, but BioSpyder was clearly not interested in that approach. We look forward to a fair and speedy resolution of our infringement claims."