BREONICS, INC. prevails over Vitrolife in European Patent Opposition

Albany, New York (September 29, 2010) On September 29th, the European Patent Office (EPO) upheld US-based BREONICS’ European Patent No. 1021084, which relates inter alia to a proprietary organ transplant system known as the Exsanguinous Metabolic Support (EMS). In doing so, the EPO dismissed (on all substantive points) a validity challenge by Swedish-based VitroLife. BREONICS’ European patent provides protection for a novel technology that that can be used to intervene after cardiac arrest and repair ischemically damaged kidneys for transplantation. The unique ability of EMS changes today’s limitation of recovering deceased donor kidneys from within minutes of death to a window of several hours postmortem. This significantly broadens the criteria for organ donation to include those patients who are declared dead from cardiac arrest at an accident scene in the ER or in the hospital.

“This ruling is an important legal endorsement of the pioneering work that BREONICS has done over the last decade on the use of warm perfusion to increase the supply of organs available for transplantation,” said Ernie Green, Chairman of BREONICS. The ruling is an important victory for the small biotech as it seeks regulatory approval for the EMS system in its efforts to commercialize the organ transplantation technology.