Cetus Corporation

Cetus Corporation ("Cetus") — Founded in 1971 by Ronald E. Cape, Peter Farley, and Nobel laureate Donald A. Glaser, Cetus is widely regarded as the first modern biotechnology company. It was incorporated in Berkeley, California, and operated primarily from Emeryville, California, with a European arm, EuroCetus, in Amsterdam. Cetus was publicly traded (NASDAQ: CTUS) following a record $108 million IPO in 1981. The company ceased to exist as an independent entity in December 1991, when it was acquired by neighboring Chiron Corporation in a stock-swap merger valued at roughly $600–660 million; Chiron later became part of Novartis. It is therefore a defunct operating company, not an active litigant, and no current employee, revenue, or market-cap figures apply.

Products / operations — Cetus developed and manufactured biopharmaceuticals and DNA-diagnostics technology. Its lead therapeutic was interleukin-2 (IL-2), later marketed as Proleukin for metastatic kidney cancer, and it developed beta-interferon (later Betaseron) with Triton Biosciences. Its most consequential output was the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), invented at Cetus by Kary Mullis (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1993). Cetus commercialized PCR through research reagents and instruments via partnerships with Perkin-Elmer and Kodak before licensing the technology to Hoffmann-La Roche in 1989 for $300 million. It also marketed a line of generic chemotherapy agents through a joint venture with Ben Venue Laboratories.

Patent-litigation posture — The single tracked case shows Cetus as a defendant (0 plaintiff, 1 defendant appearances), consistent with an operating company defending its patents rather than a non-practicing entity asserting them. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (San Francisco), Cetus's home venue.

Notable case — E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. Cetus Corporation (N.D. Cal., filed 1990). DuPont challenged the patentability of the PCR technology, arguing that earlier work at MIT rendered it obvious. Cetus prevailed in that challenge in February 1991, a win that helped clear the way for the $300 million PCR sale to Roche that preceded the Chiron merger. A separate dispute with Eastman Kodak over PCR rights, filed in Delaware Chancery Court in 1991, was settled in 1993 among Roche, Kodak, and Chiron.