Wednesday, May 20, 2009

MIT and spinout sue DNA testing firm Navigenics

By Mass High Tech staff

MIT and its spinout E8 Pharmaceuticals LLC teamed up to file a patent infringement lawsuit Tuesday against California-based personalized genetic testing firm Navigenics Inc. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, seeks $75 million in damages for E8 and MIT.

Access to the filing does not include details of the case nor the nature of the filing.

Navigenics develops technology to reveal genetic predisposition to health conditions.

Last July, E8 Pharmaceuticals and MIT jointly sued Affymetrix Inc., a developer of the first DNA microarray, alleging that the company’s GeneChip technology infringed on a patent owned by MIT and licensed by E8, according to a report on GenomeWeb.  Both MIT and Affymetrix have claimed first development rights and ownership of the patent that takes sample DNA and creates genetic analysis from it.

E8 Pharmaceuticals was co-founded by MIT biology professor David Housman, an inventor included on the patent related to the lawsuit against Affymetrix, and Richard Mulligan, a genetics professor at Harvard University, the GenomeWeb article reports.