Plaintiff
2 cases as plaintiff.
Company overview. Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. ("Roche") is the US affiliate of F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd / Roche Holding Ltd, the Swiss healthcare group founded by Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche in 1896 and headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. Roche Holding Ltd is publicly listed (SIX: RO / ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) and reported 2024 group sales of roughly CHF 60.5 billion with about 100,000 employees worldwide (Roche 2024 annual results; MarketScreener). Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. was Roche's US operating subsidiary, historically headquartered at 340 Kingsland Street, Nutley, New Jersey, where its US operations moved in 1928; Roche closed the Nutley site and consolidated R&D in Switzerland and Germany by end-2013 (Roche media release, June 2012), and US commercial activities were subsequently organized under Genentech.
Products / services / operations. Roche operates two divisions: Pharmaceuticals, covering oncology, immunology, neuroscience, ophthalmology and infectious disease, and Diagnostics, covering in vitro diagnostics — immunodiagnostics, clinical chemistry, molecular diagnostics, pathology/tissue staining and sequencing — including the cobas platforms. The US affiliate historically included Roche Molecular Systems, the PCR/Taq polymerase business, which is the technology focus of the tracked litigation. This is an operating company, not a patent assertion entity.
Patent-litigation posture. The tracked data show Hoffmann-La Roche as plaintiff in 2 of 3 cases and defendant in 1 — consistent with an operating company that both enforces its own patents and is occasionally sued. Its plaintiff-side matters relate to enforcement of the Taq polymerase patent estate against a licensee; its single defendant-side matter was an antitrust suit brought by a Taq purchaser, not a standard NPE assertion. Cases sit in the Northern District of California and the District of Columbia, with a Federal Circuit appeal; none are in Eastern District of Texas.
Notable cases. Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc. v. Promega Corp. (N.D. Cal. 1992; Fed. Cir. 2003, 323 F.3d 1354) concerned U.S. Patent 4,889,818 covering native Taq DNA polymerase, acquired via Roche's 1991 $300 million purchase of PCR rights from Cetus. The Federal Circuit affirmed unenforceability for inequitable conduct. Molecular Diagnostics Laboratories v. Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. (D.D.C., 402 F. Supp. 2d 276) was a Walker Process antitrust claim over that patent; the court allowed direct-purchaser standing, and the parties settled in 2008 for $33 million.
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Roche sued Promega for infringement of US 4,889,818 and breach of the Cetus–Promega license agreement covering Roche's PCR process patents. The district court found the '818 patent unenforceable for inequitable conduct; the Federal Circuit vacated in part and remanded, and on remand the district court again held the patent unenforceable.
Federal Circuit appeal from the district court's inequitable conduct ruling. The court affirmed in part and reversed in part, upholding some findings and remanding for the district court to determine whether the surviving incidents justified unenforceability.