Illumina’s response to the CMA’s recent findings that their acquisition of PacBio would be anti-competitive was published on the CMA website today. And both theirs, and PacBio’s stock are up (a little bit) as a result. Their suggested remedies include:
- To grant a perpetual, royalty-free, irrevocable, licence to any of Illumina’s and PacBio’s pre-closing patents and patent applications to any interested third party for use in the field of single molecule, native long read sequencing.
- To relinquish any exclusive rights in the field of single molecule, native long read sequencing that Illumina or PacBio might have from in-licensed patents.
- To make available to any interested third party undertaking a complete form license agreement for use in the field of single molecule, native long read sequencing.
Illumina are clear in their response that they do not agree that the CMA’s provisional findings are correct. They also highlight the customer benefits of this merger; better access, easier adoption (particularly in the clinic), improved PacBio technology, easy to access bundled solutions and accelerated innovation. And lastly they push back against the CMAs concern over competition by highlighting the companies other long-read vendors could work with e.g. BGI, Thermo Fisher…Agilent, and Omniome (see below if you’ve never heard of these systems).
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Oxford Nanopore…
About Agilnet (LaserGen)
Lasergen was developing its proprietary Lightning Terminators as part of an NGS platform that includes chemistry, instrumentation, and software. Agilent has never announced platform specifications or timelines.
About Omniome
Omniome is developing a DNA sequencing platform based on “Sequencing By Binding” that provides a scar-free technology and promises enhanced precision of nucleotide and DNA matching by leveraging the natural matching ability of the polymerase. www.omniome.com.
The new offer, which oddly follows the previous one after just one week, doesn’t address the key concern that a 90%+ monopoly becomes a 95%+ monopoly. No commercial remedies to that have been proposed.
The IP offer isnt as broad as it seems, because it has been limited to “native single molecule long read”, a limit which renders most of the patent offered as irrelevant. So it looks like an attempt to dupe the CMA.
I’m sure anybody doing short, or long and short, with any complementation/amplification/PCR/CCS/RCA steps, wouldn’t find the offer very helpful. I think that includes just about anybody.
I doubt they’ll dupe anyone and you’re right about the limitations making the offer rather…limited!
Richard/James, did you review the actual list of patents being offered up by ILMN and PACB? It is posted on the CMA website.
Seems pretty extensive (6.5k from ILMN and 1.25k from PACB). Would be very interested to know what you think is missing. Thanks
I’m seeing patents related to amplification, PCR, CCS, RCA, etc. Maybe the summary is misleading. Curious for your take though.
I Had not looked through this list which is pretty huge!
There are 6.5k patents in the Illumina file and a quick search of the USPTO for “Illumina” only found just under 6000. Time to apply for my licence!
Apply for it but you’ll be limited to native single molecule long read. You might spend years in court arguing over what that means.