Lexicon sues Deltagen for patent infringement

Four additional patents help fan the litigation flame

Lexicon Genetics Inc. (The Woodlands, TX) has filed a second lawsuit for patent infringement against Deltagen Inc. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, alleges that Deltagen is willfully infringing the claims of four U.S. patents under which Lexicon holds exclusive licenses. In the complaint, Lexicon is seeking unspecified damages from Deltagen, as well as injunctive relief.

United States Patents 5,464,764, 5,487,992, 5,627,059, and 5,631,153 describe technology developed by Mario Capecchi at the University of Utah and broadly cover methods and vectors for using positive-negative selection for producing gene targeted, or "knockout," cells and animals. Earlier this year, Lexicon filed a lawsuit alleging that Deltagen had infringed on U.S. Patent No. 5,789,215, which covers the use of isogenic DNA technology, which Lexigen claims is critical for producing knockout mice on a commercial scale using homologous recombination. Lexicon uses both of these patented technologies for producing knockout mice as part of its internal drug discovery programs as well as to support Lexicon's corporate partnerships.

In addition to the patented technologies that are being asserted against the defendant, Lexicon has patented a next-generation, high-throughput knockout mouse technology that it has used to create the OmniBank library of more than 95,000 knockout mouse clones.

"We believe Deltagen's products and services demonstrate use of and dependence upon the technology covered by these additional patents, as well as the patented technology that is the subject of our original infringement suit against Deltagen," stated Arthur T. Sands, Lexicon Genetics' president and CEO. "We intend to enforce our rights under these patents and continue our strategy of building and protecting our substantial intellectual property portfolio in functional genomics."

Lexicon's sublicensees under the newly-asserted patents include Pfizer Inc., Roche Bioscience, Schering-Plough Research Institute, Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., Genentech Inc., Amgen Inc., Ligand Pharmaceuticals Inc., American Home Products, DuPont Pharmaceuticals Co., and Biogen Inc. All sublicenses are for internal use only and may not be extended to cover infringing animals and cells produced by commercial service providers such as Deltagen. In order to make this important technology widely available to the academic research community, Lexicon has offered to grant free non-commercial, research-use only sublicenses to academic and non-profit research institutions.

For more information, contact Lance K. Ishimoto, vice president of intellectual property for Lexicon Genetics, at 281-364-0100.

Edited by Angelo DePalma
Managing Editor, DrugDiscovery Online and Pharmaceutical Online
Email: adepalma@vertical.net