10x Genomics v Vizgen (CFI, 20 December 2024)

Date	20 December 2024
Court	CFI
Division	Hamburg (DE) Local Division
Type of action	Application Rop 333
Registry reference	App_62866/2024 · ORD_62955/2024
Parties	President and Fellows of Harvard College

Official decision (PDF) · UPC registry entry

Dhenne Avocats represents claimants and defendants in European patent disputes before the Unified Patent Court, including the Paris divisions.

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Dhenne Avocats · 10 October 2026

Our analysis

Summary

By an order of 20 December 2024 (UPC_CFI_22/2023, ORD_62955/2024), the Hamburg Local Division (Judge Klepsch presiding and acting as judge-rapporteur, Judges Schilling, Kokke and Burrichter), on a Rule 333 review, confirmed the order of 8 November 2024 rejecting as inadmissible the third application to amend EP 4 108 782 filed by President and Fellows of Harvard College in the infringement action it brought with 10x Genomics against Vizgen. Leave to appeal was granted. The order applies Rule 30.2 strictly where the amendment responds to an EPO preliminary opinion known for almost three months.

Question

Is an application to amend the patent filed after the defence to the counterclaim admissible under Rule 30.2 where the amended version could have been filed earlier?

Decision

No. The review application was admissible, the judge-rapporteur’s order being a case management decision (section 1). On the merits, Rule 30.1 requires amendments to be filed with the defence to the counterclaim. Rule 30.2 is an exception operating as a strict preclusion rule. The test is objective: the proprietor’s expectations as to delay are irrelevant. The amended version could have been filed in response to the opposition division’s preliminary opinion of 2 August 2024, and filing in late October 2024 was not explained (section 2). Leave to appeal was granted, as the questions raised by Rule 30.2 have not yet been uniformly answered and are of general significance.

Key points for practice

Practical point: any amendment prompted by an EPO opinion in parallel opposition proceedings should be filed before the UPC without delay, failing which it may be inadmissible.

Provisions applied

Agreement on a Unified Patent Court: Art. 73(2)(b)
Rules of Procedure: Rules 9, 29, 30.1, 30.2, 220.2, 224.1 and 333

Prepared by Dhenne Avocats from the official decision, consulted on 10 October 2026. The database is updated every week, on Friday. Only the official text is authoritative.

Going further

Lexicon: Written procedure (UPC).

Source and translations

Official source: Unified Patent Court registry link recorded in the record
Original language: not recorded
Translation available: no translation recorded the firm’s French record is a summary, not a translation
Date checked: not recorded

Only the official text is authoritative. A machine translation is never presented as official, republishing a third-party document requires a verified basis in rights, and a link to the source is preferred.

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Proceedings, related decisions, appeals, parties and patents as recorded in the registry and in the Dhenne Avocats corpus. Each link states its source.

Proceedings

No case number recorded in this record.

Parties

claimantPresident and Fellows of Harvard College29 decisions in the corpus Follow this party

Exact name as it appears in the record, group affiliation only where sourced and dated.

Decisions in the same proceedings and documented appeals

No other decision in the corpus bears the same case number, and no appeal is documented in the corpus to date.

What the record states

Nature of the act: Application Rop 333
Outcome (Dhenne Avocats summary): La formation confirme l'irrecevabilité de la troisième demande de modification du brevet de Harvard, qui aurait pu être présentée après l'avis préliminaire de l'OEB, et autorise l'appel.
Appeal: No appeal documented in the corpus, this does not mean that no appeal was lodged.
Instance: First-instance decision, whether it has become final is not recorded.

Patents mentioned

EP 4 108 782 mentioned in: Dhenne Avocats analysis Follow this patent

Scope: Dhenne Avocats corpus. Registry-based links are marked “official number”; links derived from the analyses are marked as such. An erroneous link can be withdrawn without deleting any record.

Patents and standards

Publication	Role in the dispute	Family	Standard and declaration	Pool	Sources
`EP 4 108 782` Compositions and methods for analyte detection recorded proprietor: Harvard University	Mentioned in the analysis (role not qualified) Also mentioned in 18 other decision(s): NanoString Technologies v 10x Genomics (CoA, 11 March 2024) · 10x Genomics v NanoString (CFI, 19 September 2023) · 10x Genomics v Bruker Spatial Biology (CFI, 11 April 2025) · 10x Genomics v Vizgen (CoA, 11 March 2025) · 10x Genomics v Vizgen (CoA, 5 March 2025) · NanoString Technologies v 10x Genomics (CoA, 10 December 2024) · 10x Genomics v Vizgen (CFI, 1 November 2024) · 10x Genomics v Vizgen (CFI, ORD_49363/2024, 24 October 2024)	not recorded	not recorded	not recorded	Espacenet · European Patent Register existence and title of the publication checked on 30 October 2026 (Google Patents, Espacenet and Register links are not checked automatically) mentioned in: Dhenne Avocats analysis

The statuses “asserted in litigation”, “declared essential”, “listed by a pool” and “essentiality examined by a court” are distinct and may coexist. Validity, infringement and technical essentiality are different questions. Scope: patents cited in the decisions of the Dhenne Avocats corpus, with no essentiality score or prediction.

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