Marcy l'Etoile, France - 20 avril 2004. The European Patent Office’s Board of Appeal has found in favour of bioMérieux in the opposition to its European patent for the Boom technology.
European Patent No. 0,389,063 granted in 1997 is owned by bioMérieux further to the acquisition of Organon Teknika (the Azko Nobel diagnostics division) in 2001.
The BOOM technology is the method of choice for efficient and high-quality extraction of nucleic acid from a wide variety of biological sample types and is recognized as the gold standard. Extraction is a crucial part of nucleic acid amplification systems for diagnosis, screening and monitoring and is also of essential importance in molecular biology research. Boom technology employs silica and a chaotropic agent to obtain purified nucleic acid preparations. It can be uniformly applied to all kinds of samples, such as whole blood, blood serum or plasma, sputum, sperm, faeces, saliva, tissues and cell cultures, foods products, vegetable material, urine, tissue cells, body fluids and biological material possibly infected with virus and bacteria.
All these kinds of samples, amongst others, are covered by the claims upheld after the final decision of the European Patent Office.
Benoît Adelus, Executive Vice President of bioMérieux said: “We are very pleased with the Board of Appeal’s decision and with the broad claims that have emerged. This will reinforce our commitment to provide molecular laboratories with state-of-the-art products and ensure further sales growth”
bioMérieux recently launched NucliSens® miniMAG™ and NucliSens Magnetic Extraction Reagents, two key components of the company’s next generation nucleic acid extraction technology. NucliSens miniMAG offers an easy-to-use, cost-effective and high capacity extraction solution, attractive for most molecular laboratories. In addition, the NucliSens miniMAG platform will be fully compatible with an automated platform currently under development within bioMérieux, for future upgrading of molecular laboratory strategies.