Defendant
1 case as defendant.
I'll research this company before writing the profile.
Applera Corporation was a Norwalk, Connecticut–based life-sciences holding company (301 Merritt 7). Incorporated in Delaware in 1998, it was the successor to The Perkin-Elmer Corporation's life-sciences business; Perkin-Elmer was recapitalized in May 1999 as PE Corporation and renamed Applera effective Nov. 30, 2000. Applera itself was not a single-ticker public company — it issued two tracking stocks, Applera–Applied Biosystems Group (NYSE: ABI) and Applera–Celera Genomics Group (NYSE: CRA). It had roughly 5,000 employees around 2000, ranked #874 on the 2007 Fortune 1000, and its Applied Biosystems unit reported about $2.1 billion in fiscal 2007 sales. The entity no longer exists: Celera was separated as Celera Corporation on July 1, 2008, Applera was renamed Applied Biosystems Inc., and that company merged with Invitrogen in November 2008 to form Life Technologies, acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2014.
Operations. Applied Biosystems (Foster City, CA) developed and sold instrument-based systems, consumables/reagents, software, and services for DNA, RNA, protein, and small-molecule analysis — including ABI PRISM DNA sequencers/genetic analyzers, TaqMan real-time quantitative PCR chemistry and sequence-detection systems, and mass-spectrometry platforms — serving research, pharmaceutical, forensic human-identification, biosecurity, and food/environmental testing markets. Celera Genomics (Rockville, MD) supplied genomic information and later pursued drug discovery/diagnostics, with a diagnostics joint venture (Celera Diagnostics) that later allied with Abbott.
Litigation posture. In the tracked data, Applera appears in one case, solely as a defendant (0 plaintiff, 1 defendant) — the profile of an operating company being sued rather than a non-practicing entity. The sole tracked matter sits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, not a plaintiff-friendly venue such as the Eastern District of Texas. External reporting indicates Applera was also an active patent enforcer elsewhere (e.g., thermal-cycler litigation against MJ Research), so it functioned as a two-way litigant.
Notable case. Molecular Diagnostics Laboratories v. Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. et al. (filed Sept. 23, 2003, D.D.C.) was a direct-purchaser class action alleging that Roche and Applera used Roche's '818 Taq DNA polymerase patent — previously held unenforceable for inequitable conduct — to monopolize the Taq market, raising Walker Process and conspiracy claims. The court denied the defendants' motions to dismiss (402 F. Supp. 2d 276, 2005); the parties settled on Sept. 26, 2008, with defendants paying $33 million to a direct-purchaser class.
Direct-purchaser class action alleging Walker Process antitrust claims against Roche and Applera over the Taq polymerase patent. The court's 2005 opinion named US 4,683,195 and US 4,683,202 as related Roche PCR patents; the case later settled in 2008 for $33 million.