Edward R. Reines

Redwood City

Patent Litigation

Edward R. Reines says he's currently investing his time into protecting companies, rights and products in the biotechnology and genomics field.

"It's the use of DNA for improving people's lives through medicine largely, but there are a lot of interesting things, such as fetal diagnostics using DNA blood tests, that everyone should know about ... There's a lot of innovation in the genomics area, so that creates a lot of intellectual property disputes. That's where I come in."

Earlier this year, Reines, along with firm partner Derek Walter, were able to get The Patent Trial and Appeal Board to invalidate two Agilent Technologies patents -- which included 63 claims -- that were asserted against their client Synthego, a synthetic biology company focused on technology that research scientists use to selectively modify the DNA of living organisms. Synthego Corp. v. Agilent Technologies, Inc., 3:21-cv-07801 (N.D. Cal., filed Oct. 5, 2021).

"Agilent was trying to shut down our company from selling its main product because they believed they had the rights that everyone would need to perform this work, so we counter attacked and invalidated the patents, freeing the CRISPR -- repetitive DNA sequencing that stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats -- community from threats like this," he said.

Agilent has since filed a notice of appeal, seeking to resurrect the patents.

In 2022, Reines led a team that helped achieve a $45 million false advertising jury verdict on behalf of CareDX, Inc. against Natera, Inc. The jury found nine of the 10 challenged statements Natera made about its competing test in public-facing marketing materials were false, the false advertising was intentional and willful, and that Natera's conduct was evidence of unfair competition. CareDX, Inc. v. Natera, Inc., 19-662-CFC-CJB (D. Del., filed Dec. 20, 2019).

However, Reines said that the judge recently upheld the finding that there was false advertising by Natera and entered an injunction preventing them from continuing it. "He thought there wasn't sufficient evidence for the damage award we had ... We're going to go on appeal and seek to have that jury award reinstated."

--Devon Belcher