Reportedly, in 2006, Health Discovery has sued Ciphergen Biosystems in Federal District Court for infringement of several of its patents covering the use of support vector machines (SVMs) for the discovery of biomarkers. As alleged in the complaint, Ciphergen’s researchers had used SVMs to identify the biomarkers for diagnosis of ovarian cancer, the results of which had been reported in a number of medical publications.
The settlement agreement, through which Ciphergen was granted a limited license to continue its use of the company’s SVM technology only in conjunction with its protein based SELDI mass spectrometry technology, was inked in July 2007.
No rights were granted under the license to use HDC’s SVM technology for gene-based molecular diagnostic discovery, digital pathology interpretations, digital radiology interpretation nor any other discovery use outside of the very narrow field of SELDI-based protein discovery.
Stephen Barnhill, chairman and CEO of HDC, said: “In addition to our own biomarker discovery programs, we are continuing to pursue revenue-producing licensing opportunities, retroactively, as in the case of Vermillion, and going forward, to develop new applications of the technology within our intellectual property portfolio. The results achieved by Vermillion provide further testimony to the value of Health Discovery’s proprietary SVM technology, both from a technical and a financial perspective.”