Takara Bio USA wins EU opposition hearing, revoking Jumpcode Genomics’ NGS library enrichment patent

San Jose, CA—December 11, 2023—Takara Bio USA, Inc. today announced that it has once again prevailed in its second patent dispute with Jumpcode Genomics, Inc. The latest result concerns Takara Bio USA’s challenge to the validity of Jumpcode’s granted European patent EP3102722. Following a hearing before the Opposition Division of the European Patent Office on November 28, the European Patent Office revoked Jumpcode’s patent in its entirety, with no claims allowed. This contrasts with Jumpcode’s earlier challenge to Takara Bio USA’s European Patent (EP3105325), which the European Patent Office upheld following a similar hearing last year. In that earlier hearing, the Opposition Division held that Takara Bio USA’s independent Claim 1, the broadest claim in the patent, is valid and should therefore be maintained as originally granted.

“We are very pleased with the outcome of the recent hearing in which the Opposition Division revoked Jumpcode’s European patent. This latest decision reinforces the strength of Takara Bio USA’s European patent and portfolio, which supports some of our most innovative RNA-seq technologies,” said Carol Lou, President & CEO of Takara Bio USA.

The claims of Takara Bio USA’s patent 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 using 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 results by reducing the need to sequence unwanted abundant sequences derived from rRNA.

EP3105325 forms part of Takara Bio USA’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, which contain 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.