Raindance Techs., Inc. v. 10X Genomics, Inc., Civil Action No. 15-152-RGA

• Decision Date: 04 March 2016
• Docket Number: Civil Action No. 15-152-RGA
• Parties: RAINDANCE TECHNOLOGIES, INC., et al., Plaintiffs, v. 10X GENOMICS, INC., Defendant.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Delaware

RAINDANCE TECHNOLOGIES, INC., et al., Plaintiffs, v. 10X GENOMICS, INC., Defendant.

Civil Action No. 15-152-RGA

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF DELAWARE

March 4, 2016

MEMORANDUM ORDER

Pending is a motion to dismiss, arguing that Plaintiffs fail to state a claim. (D.I. 15).

Plaintiffs' first amended complaint is thirty-five pages long, but its essential factual allegations do not take up much space. Plaintiffs have seven patents, six of which are all method claims, and the seventh of which alleges systems and methods.¹ At a high level, the asserted claims are methods "for conducting an auto catalytic reaction in a microfluidic system," "for conducting a reaction in plugs in a microfluidic system," "[for] a microfluidic system comprising . . . polymerase chain reactions," and "of conducting a reaction within at least one plug."

What does Defendant do to infringe these claims? It sells the "10X Genomics platform," which Plaintiff first heard about on January 14, 2015. (¶14).² The platform consists of at least two products - the "GemCode Instrument" for $75,000, and "GemCode Reagents" for $500 persample. Software is involved. Defendant has a website that provides some description of these items. (¶¶15, 21). One Plaintiff has a "patented and proven RainDrop® digital droplet system." (¶11). That Plaintiff and Defendant are "close competitors in the emerging field of using microfluidic devices to deliver biological reagents so that complex genetic analysis may be simplified and scaled." (¶12). Plaintiffs quote various things that Defendant says about the GemCode Platform on its website, such as, the "GemCode Platform is a molecular barcoding and analysis suite for a broad range of applications including targeted, exome, and whole genome sequencing." (¶15). And, the GemCode Instrument is "designed to rapidly and efficiently automate the equivalent of over a million pipetting steps for highly parallel sample partitioning and molecular barcoding. . . . The instrument utilizes advanced microfluidics that partition 8 samples in parallel in ~5 minutes." (Id.). And, the "GemCode reagent delivery system partitions arbitrarily long DNA molecules (including >100kb) and prepares sequencing libraries in parallel such that all fragments produced within a partition share a common barcode. A simple workflow combines large partition numbers with a massively diverse barcode library to generate >100,000 barcode containing partitions in a matter of minutes." (¶16). There are some diagrams and pictures that appear to originate at conferences where Defendant was promoting its product. What I gather from these diagrams and snapshots is that Defendant's product provides a "barcoded primer library"which interacts somehow with DNA enzymes (or maybe the DNA in enzymes) and oil, with the interacted molecules being collected together, treated in some fashion (cycled and pooled) to form some sort of mixture. (See ¶¶16, 17, 18). Another of Defendant's explanations describes four steps in its process: (1) "Molecular barcoding in GEMs," (2) "Pool, Ligate right adapter," (3) "Sample indexing PCR [polymerase chain reaction]," and (4) "Sequence and Analyze." (D.I. 19). The final factual allegation about Defendant's product isthat the "GemCode Software maps short read data to original long molecules using the barcodes provided by the reagent delivery system." (¶20).

Plaintiffs filed this suit on February 12, 2015, after first learning about Defendant's activities and products slightly less than a month before. The amended complaint was filed two months later. It does not appear from Plaintiff's reliance on promotional materials that it has purchased one of Defendant's products to see how it actually works.

Count I's asserted patent is U.S. Patent No. 8,658,430, which claims:

1. A method for droplet formation, the method comprising the steps of:

providing a plurality of aqueous fluids each in its own aqueous fluid channel in fluid communication with one or more immiscible carrier fluid channels;

forming droplets of aqueous fluid surrounded by an immiscible carrier fluid in the aqueous fluid channels;

applying a same constant pressure to the carrier fluid in each of the immiscible carrier fluid channels; and

adjusting pressure in one or more of the aqueous fluid channels, thereby to produce droplets of aqueous fluid in one or more outlet fluid channels.

There is nothing in the complaint (at least so far as I can see) that hints at the role of pressure in Defendant's products.

Count III's asserted patent is U.S. Patent No. 8,304,193, which claims:

1. A method for conducting an autocatalytic reaction in plugs in a microfluidic system, comprising the steps of:

providing the microfluidic system comprising at least two channels having at least one junction;

flowing an aqueous fluid containing at least one substrate molecule and reagents for conducting an autocatalytic reaction through a first channel of the at least two channels;

flowing an oil through the second channel of the at least two channels;

forming at least one plug of the aqueous fluid containing the at least one substratemolecule and

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