Those 10X Patents
10X have been suing a lot of people in the spatial space using various pieces of IP. My very informal review of the of some of the lawsuits suggested the IP had about 7 years to run.
Anyway, someone was asking about this again and I decided to dig a bit further. The majority of patents appear to expire on 2031-04-05, I think this is because they all claim priority based on this patent filed in 2011.
Here’s a list of the patents I dug up and the expiry dates listed on google patents (if you have any others, or further thoughts please reach out):
There’s this one patent that expires in 2036. This seems like a really fun patent with lots of neat figures like this one:
However it seems to mostly cover the imaging system. And the patent itself doesn’t seem to be discussed in detail in the court documents I’ve looked at.
As such, for the most part we seem to be looking at April 2031, in particular lawsuits relating to the Visium IP appear to use IP that expires on this date. Xenium IP may have one or two years longer to run.
So if this IP continued to be enforced, and continues to be effective at blocking other spatial companies 10X will have the spatial market locked up for another 7 years!
As always I welcome thoughts and comments on the Discord or via email (new@sgenomics.org).