ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,352,755, issued on July 8, was assigned to Amgen Inc. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.).

"Systems and methods for preparing a sample and performing a real-time assay of the sample" was invented by Chao-Hsiang Wu (Thousand Oaks, Calif.), Gang Xue (Lexington, Mass.), Brandon Zachary Sarich (Thousand Oaks, Calif.), Michael R. Berke (Newbury Park, Calif.), Jacob Sebastain (Thousand Oaks, Calif.) and Pik Chan (Thousand Oaks, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Systems and methods that facilitate the automatic (or substantially automatic) preparation of a sample of a product containing molecules for analysis and automatic (or substantially automatic) p...