A Diagnostics & Imaging Week

Stanford University (Palo Alto, California) has sued Roche Holding (Basel, Switzerland) over a diagnostic kit that tests how well treatments for AIDS are working. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, alleges that Roche’s Amplicor test infringes two patents owned by the university.

The lawsuit is part of a lengthy dispute between Roche and Stanford over who owns the technology for polymerase chain reaction assays that test blood to determine the quantity of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Roche has maintained that it bought the rights from Cetus Corp. in 1991.