A Medical Device Daily
Quovadx (Greenwood Village, Colorado) reported that Senior District Judge Richard Matsch, in the federal court in the District of Colorado, issued a final judgment approving the settlement of the class action lawsuit captioned Heller v. Quovadx, Inc., et al., and dismissed with prejudice all claims alleged in the action against the company and the individual defendants.
This lawsuit, which arose from the company’s restatement in March 2004 of historical financial results, was originally filed on June 10, 2004.
Under the terms of the approved settlement, class members and their counsel received $9 million in exchange for their release of the company and the individual defendants, with prejudice, of all claims under Sections 10b and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
Of the $9 million settlement, Quovadx contributed $2 million, and its insurance carriers contributed $7 million. As a result of the final judgment, the company has no further liability in this lawsuit.
Quovadx offers software and services for system development, extension, integration and analysis to enterprise customers worldwide. Quovadx has three divisions, including the Integration Solutions division (ISD), which offers private and public healthcare organizations software infrastructure to facilitate system interoperability and leverage existing technology, the CareScience division, which provides care management and analytical solutions to hospitals and health systems, and the Rogue Wave Software division, which provides reusable software components and services for enterprise-class application development and high-performance SOA.
Third Wave Technologies (Madison, Wisconsin) reported that it has filed its response to the recent patent lawsuit brought against it by Digene (Gaithersburg, Maryland) back in January (Medical Device Daily, Jan. 16, 2007).
The company’s answer to the suit was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin in Madison, where it is being heard.
Third Wave’s response includes counterclaims against Digene alleging that it “has abused its monopoly power to thwart competition in the human papilloma virus, or HPV, diagnostic marketplace.”
“Digene filed its patent infringement suit knowing that Third Wave’s Invader chemistry is superior to Digene’s and does not infringe its patent, as our response asserts,” said Kevin Conroy, president/CEO of Third Wave. “While Third Wave prefers competing in the marketplace, we have made a careful decision to file this counterclaim to end the anti-competitive conduct of Digene detailed in our response. We expect to prevail at trial.”
Third Wave said it has retained the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis to represent it in this lawsuit.
A scheduling conference will be held on March 15, when an early 2008 trial date is expected to be set.
Third Wave develops molecular diagnostic reagents for a variety of DNA and RNA analysis applications.
In other legalities:
• Integrated Genomics (IG; Chicago) said it has filed a lawsuit against two former employees for breach of their employment contracts with IG, including breach of their non-competition and non-solicitation obligations.
Nikos Kyrpides, the former Director of Bioinformatics at IG, and Natala Ivanova resigned and took positions with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI; Walnut Creek, California). The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago alleges that Kyrpides, while still an IG employee, recruited other IG employees to accept positions at the JGI to develop a competing software system to IG’s ERGO Genomic Analysis software. The suit further alleges that both Kyrpides and Ivanova then proceeded to develop a competing software product while at the JGI in violation of their agreements not to engage in such activities.
IG provides a range of products and services to support research in microbial genomics, biochemistry and gene expression.