Takara Bio USA wins EU opposition hearing on its foundational NGS library enrichment patent

San Jose, CA—February 15, 2022—Takara Bio USA, Inc. (TBUSA) today announced that the European Patent Office has reviewed and confirmed the validity of TBUSA’s granted European patent EP 3105325, entitled “Methods of depleting a target molecule from an initial collection of nucleic acids, and compositions and kits for practicing the same.” TBUSA’s patent was opposed by Jumpcode Genomics, Inc.

The patent was challenged under multiple headings, relating both to formalities of the European Patent Office and to the patentability of the invention. Most significantly, the Opposition Division of the European Patent Office agreed with TBUSA that independent Claim 1, the broadest claim in the patent, is valid and should therefore be maintained as originally granted. The claims of EP 3105325 relate to a method of selectively depleting cDNAs derived from ribosomal RNAs (rRNA) from a sample either by cleavage or selectively separating them from the sample through the use of nucleic acid guided nucleases, such as CRISPR/Cas nucleases. The method of the invention thus enables researchers to greatly improve the sensitivity of their RNA-Seq libraries and achieve significantly more cost-effective sequencing results by reducing the need to sequence unwanted abundant sequences derived from rRNA.

EP 3105325 forms part of TBUSA’s extensive global portfolio of granted and pending patents covering the methods used in its SMARTer Stranded Total RNA-Seq and SMART-Seq Stranded kits, containing ZapR technology. These kits were developed to work with high- or low-quality total RNA, do not require additional rRNA removal methods or kits, and produce sequencing libraries that retain strand-of-origin information. The integrated ZapR-based removal of rRNA-derived cDNAs—typically present in high abundance following cDNA synthesis from total RNA inputs—makes these product workflows extremely sensitive, yielding data that is highly reproducible with low mapping to rRNA.

“This European patent represents an important part of the broad global intellectual property that protects our innovative RNA-Seq product portfolio, so we are very pleased with the outcome of the opposition proceedings, and that the Opposition Division concurred with TBUSA regarding the validity and scope of the patent,” said Carol Lou, President and CEO of TBUSA.