Caliper Technologies has settled its patent infringement lawsuit against Molecular Devices, which alleged that the latter's IMAP assay products infringed Caliper's US patents.

As a result of the settlement, Molecular Devices has taken out a non-exclusive license to Caliper's patents (Nos 6,287,774 and 6,472,141) and has agreed to pay Caliper an undisclosed one-time licensing fee, as well as royalties based on future sales of IMAP products.

The '774 and '141 patents cover methods and systems for performing a wide variety of assays in which the reaction product has a different charge than the substrate. The product (or substrate) is bound to a polyionic component, and the binding is detected by any of a variety of conventional methods, including fluorescence polarisation.

This method complements other microfluidic approaches, also developed by Caliper, to address important unmet needs in high-throughput pharmaceutical screening.

The IMAP technology uses the specific binding of metal coordination complexes to phosphate groups at high salt concentration and a fluorescence polarisation read-out. Molecular Devices ' IMAP range is targeted particularly at kinase assays, and is applicable to a wide variety of tyrosine and serine/threonine kinases.

"Now we can fully dedicate our efforts towards advancing our product pipeline " commented Kevin Hrusovsky, president and chief executive of Caliper. He added that the settlement also reinforces the strength of Caliper's intellectual property estatein the area of high throughput screening, "including the increasingly important area of kinase screening."