🚨 European Court Blocks Curio Bioscience's Seeker Kit Sales

Affected countries for now: France, Germany, and Sweden

On Tuesday, the European Unified Patent Court (UPC) issued a preliminary injunction against Curio Bioscience. This injunction results from the European Patent No. 2,697,391 infringement concerning Curio's Seeker Spatial Transcriptomics Kit. 10x Genomics holds the patent in question.

Impact for researchers 👩🏻‍🔬👨🏽‍🔬

Curio Bioscience will stop selling the Curio Seeker Kit in France, Germany, or Sweden. The European patent No. 2,697,391 protects "an array for use in the localized detection of nucleic acid in a tissue sample comprising cells." However, it appears that Curio Bioscience has developed a new version of the “Seeker kit” that they claim does not infringe the patent in question. So, they intend to commercialize it right away avoiding any interruption of its use in the affected countries.

For now, Curio Bioscience has not disclosed 🤐 the workings of their alternative Seeker kit.

Curio Seeker

Curio Seeker technology is based on the Slide-seq method, a spatial transcriptomics technique developed at the Broad Institute. It is a whole transcriptome approach and it is instrument-free. It can be used for fresh frozen tissues from eukaryotic organisms.

Figure 1: Curio Seeker Workflow. Adapted from www.curiobioscience.com

🧠 Reflection:

Here we are again, embroiled in another patent dispute in the field of spatial transcriptomics 🌎.

Independent of who is right or wrong, what worries me as a researcher is the absence of laws protect us when expensive kits and machines we rely on suddenly stop being commercialized. Without those rules, we will be throwing away money, time and resources as it will be tough to keep our research innovative.

Also, don’t companies check BEFORE announcing a product if it will infringe any patent? Well I think as a researcher, I still need to learn a lot on how companies work. 🤔

Well I hope it will not affect your projects.

Thanks for reading this. 🖤

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