By Blake Brittain
Feb 24 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Monday threw out a $96 million jury verdict against genetic testing company CareDX CDNA.O that rival Natera NTRA.O had won after a 2024 trial over patent rights in DNA testing technology for kidney transplants.
U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly determined that the patents Natera had accused CareDx of infringing were invalid.
A Natera spokesperson said that the company disagrees with the decision and will pursue "all available remedies, including appeal."
CareDx attorney Edward Reines of Weil, Gotshal & Manges said the decision was "the right outcome on the law and for organ transplant patients."
The case is one of several contentious legal disputes among competitors in the genomics industry, which involves the science of the human genome. The global genomics market was worth nearly $34 billion in 2023 and could grow to $157 billion by 2033, according to a report from biopharmaceutical news outlet BioSpace.
Austin, Texas-based Natera said in the lawsuit that CareDx's AlloSure and AlloSeq kidney transplant tests infringed two patents related to using cell-free DNA to assess a person's risk of rejecting a transplant. A jury said last year that CareDx infringed one of the patents and awarded Natera $96.3 million in damages.
Connolly said on Monday that both patents were invalid because they failed to adequately describe their inventions.
Brisbane, California-based CareDx won a $45 million false-advertising verdict against Natera in a related case in 2022. Connolly overturned that award in 2023, though he agreed that Natera had misleadingly advertised its Prospera kidney transplant tests as more effective than AlloSure.
The patent case is Natera Inc v. CareDx Inc, U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, No. 1:20-cv-00038.
For Natera: Kevin Johnson, Sandra Haberny, Drew Holmes and Jeff Nardinelli of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan
For CareDx: Edward Reines, Derek Walter and Sutton Ansley of Weil, Gotshal & Manges
Read more:
CareDx owes Natera $96 mln in genetic-testing patent case, US jury says
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington)
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