bioMérieux UK Limited and others v. Labrador Diagnostics LLC, Decision, CFI UPC, Central Division Milan, 23 October 2025, Case no. UPC_CFI_497/2024 / UPC_CFI_571/2024
BioMérieux filed a significant number of attacks: about 50 invalidity attacks, more than 12 added matter attacks, 3 novelty attacks, 1 insufficiency attack, and 6 different starting points for 30 inventive steps attacks. Labrador has put forward various defences, but only against bioMérieux’s argument that claims 9 and 14 of the Patent as granted are invalid.
The Court takes a pragmatic approach and asked BioMérieux to arrange their legal defence in order of likelihood of success. It subsequently argued that if the attacks the party considers most promising are unsuccessful, the others will be too.
“Finally the Court holds that the attacks not identified by bioMérieux as (most) promising do not warrant further investigation on the merits because, when the party submits a number of attacks that appear to be unmanageable by the Court in accordance with the principles of proportionality (point 3 of the preamble) and speed (point 7 of the preamble), and the same party is unable to re-module some of the attacks in such a way as to allow the Court to organise its time for the efficient management of the proceedings, it must be considered that if the (most) promising attacks, after assessment of the Court, do not affect the validity of the claim(s), the others wouldn’t have done so either.”
A copy if the Decsion can be read here.
