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Thermo Fisher Scientific Loans Premaitha $3M to Fund Litigation With Illumina

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – UK prenatal diagnostics company Premaitha Health has received a £1.2 million ($3 million) loan from Thermo Fisher Scientific to cover legal costs related to its ongoing patent litigation with Illumina, the company said today.

Premaitha and Thermo Fisher entered into a secured loan facility agreement, which is secured on the shares of Premaitha's Taiwanese subsidiary, Yourgene Bioscience.

Last November, a UK High Court of Justice largely ruled in favor of Illumina in the patent suit, which Illumina and its wholly-owned subsidiary Verinata Health originally filed against Premaitha in 2015. Illumina later filed two additional suits in 2016 against The Doctors Laboratory, TDL Genetics, and Roche's Ariosa Diagnostics, which were combined with the first one for a trial last summer.

Premaitha, which uses Thermo Fisher's Ion sequencing platform, has received loans from Thermo Fisher before. For example, last summer, Thermo Fisher granted the company a $5 million loan facility and in late 2015, it provided Premaitha with a $7.6 million loan.