Blue Heron responds to lawsuit

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, March 15, 2007

I really tried on Thursday to get Blue Heron’s leaders to give me a comment in time for today’s story on the intellectual property lawsuit filed against the Bothell biotech (here’s that story, http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/07/03/16/100bus_suit001.cfm). That didn’t happen, however.

The company finally issued a press release to refute the charges around 6 p.m. last night. Here’s the meat of the release:

“Codon Devices, Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts filed a lawsuit yesterday in the District of Delaware against Blue Heron Biotechnology alleging infringement of five U.S. patents purportedly relating to the preparation and manufacture of nucleic acids. Blue Heron has performed an initial assessment of Codon’s claims and believes that there is no basis in fact for the allegations of patent infringement.

“In a brief statement, John Mulligan, Blue Heron’s founder and Chief Scientific Officer emphasized that, ‘In its eight years of operation, Blue Heron has always maintained the highest levels of integrity in matters of intellectual property development and application, and we are confident that Codon’s action will be shown to be without merit. Blue Heron intends to vigorously defend against these baseless claims of patent infringement.’ Blue Heron expects no material impact on Blue Heron’s current and future business or on Blue Heron’s customers.”