SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Illumina, Inc. (Nasdaq:ILMN) today announced that, together with Solexa its wholly owned subsidiary, it has filed its initial response to the lawsuit brought by Life Technologies and Applied Biosystems on September 21, 2009 in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware. In their answer, Illumina and Solexa have denied all of Life’s and AB’s allegations of patent infringement, and have asserted that AB’s licensed patents are invalid. In their counterclaims, Illumina and Solexa have sued Life and AB for infringement of four Solexa patents by Life’s SOLiD® sequencing system. These four patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 6,831,994; 6,654,505; 7,232,656; and 7,598,035 having expiration dates falling between December 2017 and July 2019), stem from three different patent families and are applicable to various aspects of the SOLiD system, specifically sample preparation, data gathering and genome analysis. As remedy, Illumina seeks (i) a permanent injunction against further sales of the SOLiD system, (ii) the destruction of infringing SOLiD system products, and (iii) damages for Life and AB’s infringement of these four patents.
