US Patent Issued to The Johns Hopkins University on March 18 for "Safe sequencing system" (Maryland, California, Delaware Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,252,743, issued on March 18, was assigned to The Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore).

"Safe sequencing system" was invented by Bert Vogelstein (Baltimore), Kenneth W. Kinzler (Frankford, Del.), Nickolas Papadopoulos (Towson, Md.) and Isaac A. Kinde (Beaumont, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The identification of mutations that are present in a small fraction of DNA templates is essential for progress in several areas of biomedical research. Though massively parallel sequencing instruments are in principle well-suited to this task, the error rates in such instruments are generally too high to allow confident identification of rare...