Caliper Life Sciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CALP]]) of Hopkinton, MA, yesterday announced it had ended a long-standing patent dispute with San Diego’s AntiCancer. As part of the agreement, each firm will get a royalty-free license to various of the other’s optical imaging patents, as well as certain rights to sublicense the technology to third parties. The companies will share revenues generated by licensing the technologies in question.
Caliper, which develops a variety of research tools for the life sciences industry, inherited the dispute with AntiCancer in 2006, when it acquired the California firm Xenogen for $80 million. AntiCancer had filed suit against Xenogen the year before, charging that the company violated five of its patents; Xenogen had denied the charges and countersued, claiming that AntiCancer had in fact violated four of Xenogen’s patents.
In an interview with Greg Turner of the Milford Daily News, Caliper CEO Kevin Hrusovsky said he and his counterpart at AntiCancer, Robert Hoffman, were finally able to end the dispute by sitting down sans attorneys. “There was so much legal stuff going on here, we said why don’t we talk as business partners and cut to the chase,” the Caliper exec told the Daily News. “Once he and I agreed to the business terms, only then would we bring in the attorneys to go over the legal terms.”
In the bad news department, Caliper yesterday missed analysts’ expectations when it set its 2008 revenue guidance. The firm projected Q1 earnings of $26.5 million to $29.5 million, compared to an expected $30.2 million, and said it anticipated full-year revenue to fall between $142 million and $148 million, compared to an expected $150.4 million, according to an AP report.
