By Donald Zuhn —

As Patent Docs reported yesterday, Codon Devices, Inc., Duke University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed suit against Blue Heron Biotechnology on March 14th, asserting that Blue Heron’s manufacture and use of the GeneMaker® gene synthesis platform infringes plaintiffs’ U.S. Patent Nos. 5,459,039; 5,556,750; 5,679,522; 5,702,894; and
5,750,335
.  The ‘039, ‘750, ‘522, and ‘894 patents are assigned to Duke University and the ‘335 patent is assigned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Codon Devices is the exclusive licensee of all five asserted patents.  In a statement released one day after the patent infringement action was filed, Blue Heron contended that it "has performed an initial assessment of Codon’s
claims and believes that there is no basis in fact for the allegations of patent infringement."  Blue Heron founder and CSO John Mulligan contended 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.