U.S. District Court: No Merit in Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against The Jackson Laboratory

Bar Harbor, Maine -- The U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California has granted summary judgment of no patent infringement in favor of The Jackson Laboratory.

The lawsuit, brought in December 2008 by a Japanese organization, the Central Institute for Experimental Animals (CIEA), alleged that a severely immunodeficient mouse strain, developed by Jackson Professor Leonard Schultz, infringed a mouse strain patented by CIEA .

The June 1 summary judgment decision, which is a ruling by the Court without the necessity of a trial, concluded that the Jackson mouse does not infringe CIEA's patent either literally or under the legal doctrine of equivalents.

According to Jackson House Counsel David Einhorn, the dismissal by the Court "is an important success not just for The Jackson Laboratory, but for the entire biomedical research community. With the full support of the National Institutes of Health, Jackson vigorously contested the lawsuit to ensure that ongoing research using this mouse strain would not be interrupted. This mouse is used by more than 1,000 researchers worldwide to study and develop cures for cancer, AIDS, diabetes and other human diseases."

The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution with a mission to discover the genetic basis for preventing, treating and curing human diseases, and to enable research and education for the global biomedical community. A National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center, the Laboratory is also the world's source for more than 5,000 strains of genetically defined mice, is home of the mouse genome database and is an international hub for scientific courses, conferences, training and education.

Contact(s):

Joyce Peterson, 207-288-6058

For information on automatic email delivery of news releases (journalists only), please send an email request for details to news@jax.org. Please address other inquiries to pubinfo@jax.org.

Media Relations, Communications Office

The Jackson Laboratory

600 Main Street

Bar Harbor, Maine 04609-1500

Phone: 207-288-6058 (journalists only)

Main Jackson Laboratory phone: 207-288-6000

Fax: 207-288-6076

Email: news@jax.org

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