Sequenom Acquires Non-Invasive Prenatal Diagnostic Rights

(San Diego, CA,USA), a provider of fine mapping genotyping, methylation, and gene expression analysis solutions, has acquired exclusive rights in territories including the United States, Europe, Australia, Canada, and Japan as well as non-exclusive rights in China, to non-invasive prenatal diagnostic intellectual property from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong, The People's Republic of China).

The licensed intellectual property expands upon Sequenom's pre-existing portfolio of patent rights related to non-invasive prenatal genetic analysis methods using fetal nucleic acids obtained from maternal serum or plasma. These newly acquired rights include methods of fetal nucleic acid analysis using methylation markers and gene expression analysis on a maternal blood, serum, or plasma sample. As part of the agreement, Sequenom also obtained exclusive rights to a portfolio of methylation and nucleic acid markers. Financial terms were not disclosed.

We continue to build our non-invasive prenatal diagnostic intellectual property portfolio on a platform-independent basis, and these licensed rights provide us with expanded opportunities, said Harry Stylli, Ph.D., Sequenom's president and CEO. These newly acquired rights are important because they provide us with an opportunity to expand our technology offering beyond genetic analysis of fetal DNA to include epigenetic and expression analysis. In view of our pre-existing intellectual property, these additional methods of analysis may provide alternative or complementary paths to a sensitive and specific non-invasive prenatal aneuploidy solution, and more generally, may potentially reduce or avoid the technical hurdles for developing assays for a broad range of non-invasive prenatal tests.

Application of this newly acquired technology was previously reported by Sequenom in a research study published in the Nature Medicine advance online publication, January 7, 2007, and now available in the February 2007 print issue of Nature Medicine. This study showed the non-invasive prenatal determination of fetal trisomy 21 (Down syndrome) using Sequenom's massarray technology platform.

The licensed technology was invented by Professor Dennis Lo and colleagues at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Lo is an investigator in the field of non-invasive prenatal genetic analysis. These newly acquired intellectual property rights build upon the broad, non-invasive prenatal diagnostic intellectual property rights that Sequenom previously licensed from Isis Innovation, Ltd., the technology transfer company of the University of Oxford (England).




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