Letter from Serge Saxonov
To our valued customers and partners:
You may have seen news reports on some recent developments from the litigation campaign launched by Bio-Rad against 10x. A number of these reports have been inaccurate. Rest assured, we have been well prepared for any outcome to our litigation and let us make three things very clear:
- We can continue to sell our assays to you, our existing customers
- We can sell our new, proprietary Next GEM products to you as well as to new customers
- We expect to continue to service and repair products that have been previously purchased
Taking each in turn -
First, there should be no ambiguity that we can continue to sell our assays to you, our existing customers. The Court in its ruling said that "customers with existing systems will be allowed to continue to use those systems" and that "10x will not be [prevented] ... from continuing to sell consumables to customers with existing systems." This is critically important as many of your colleagues have stated that lOx systems are enabling significant biological discoveries every day and that work needs to continue.
Second, nothing in the ruling limits our ability to sell our new Next GEM products to existing and new customers. We have never believed that we used any Bio-Rad technology, but to make sure that our customers would be able to continue their research without interruption, we invested many millions of dollars into developing novel, patented Next GEM products and associated library kits. We launched the Next GEM products in May and customers can order those instruments and consumables to run most of our assays.
Third, we expect to continue to service and repair products as we have in the past.
We strongly disagree with both this ruling and the jury's verdict and we will appeal. We do of course recognize that the outcome of any particular litigation event can be uncertain. We know there will be other rulings and other headlines in the weeks and months ahead. Last week, for example, in a different case, another judge found that BioRad's single cell products infringe several of our foundational patents. We expect other rulings in the next few weeks and we have planned our business to support you regardless of how those rulings turn out.
Please do not let these headlines confuse you. We are passionately dedicated to our mission of accelerating the mastery of biology to advance human health. Every one of our employees is focused on this mission every day. We measure our success through the research enabled by our products, which has now appeared in over 450 publications. Our products-combined with your work-have led to fundamental discoveries in cancer, immunology, neuroscience and across the life sciences. We will work tirelessly to make sure that researchers have access to the products that make this work possible. Together, we have helped to ignite the single cell revolution that has led to fundamental changes in our understanding of biology. We will never be deterred from our mission.
Please contact me or our team at info@10xgenomics if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Serge Saxonov
CEO and Co-founder