News

October 21, 2011 - A Note From Sherrill

I hope everyone had a wonderful summer with their dogs! 

I wanted to let everyone know that I have caught up on email messages and am now responding within 24 hours to everyone. I know this has been frustrating for all of you when you have questions and I’m just not able to get to your message. There are a few things that you can do to help and I thought I would take the time to share these with you. 

  • If you are asking about a specific test for one of your dogs, please use our button:   (Quick Email Form) and complete all fields. The quickest way to locate the tests in our database is by the profile number and I really need this to get most answers for you. Believe it or not, I get 200-300 email messages a day for various reasons and when I get one from you where you ask about “Romeo” and sign your name “Thanks, Jane”. I put this one to the side to handle later because I have to do a search in our database for your email address, and then search for your dog, just to handle your request. If you will help me by giving me that important profile or test number, I can locate it quickly and get your answer within minutes. We have over 2,000 customers and many thousands of dogs – and a lot of them have the same names.
  • If you can’t remember your password, please use the  (Password Reset) button on our site. This flags the message as extremely important so that I can reset your password and notify you immediately. If you don’t remember your login name or password, please don’t setup another account. If you will use the same Reset Password button. When I get the message, I will compare the email address to the one in our database and let you know if they are different. I will reset your password and ask you to login using the existing email address for the account and, if necessary, change your email address by clicking the My Account link at the top of the page. This will move all of your dogs to the new email address. We have several customers with two or more accounts, all with various dogs listed. You should have one Portal page that lists all of your dogs in one place. If you have more than one account, and you want to consolidate your dogs under one email address, please let me know by regular email message and I can move the dogs over to the email address you want to use.
  • If you have a question about our process, before you send an email, please check our Q&A page. We try to list the most frequently asked questions there and give a detailed answer for you.

There are a few other things that you can help with to speed up the process of getting your tests done.

  • Before you mail in your samples, you need to enter the dog’s information from your Portal page. We cannot ship these to our lab until this is done. When we receive them, we will notify you by email that the data entry needs to be handled. We always ask that you let us know when you have completed this, and this part is very important. We check these entries about once every 10 days. If you enter the dog’s information and do not let us know, it might be another 10 days before we check on this and that is a delay in the processing of your tests. The clock doesn’t start until the samples are ready to be shipped to the lab.Be very careful in the handling of your sample. You are collecting DNA material from your dog. But… almost everything in your home or kennel has some type of DNA on it. When you get the swab from your dog, immediately put the swab back into its original packaging and then right into the Sample Envelope. If you lay the swab on a surface, you are probably contaminating it and we will not get a proper reading. Nothing should be put into the Sample Envelope except for the two swabs that are used for the test. Sample Envelopes are not opened until they get to the extraction lab so any notes or information that is enclosed with the swabs will be thrown away.
  • Put your Sample Envelopes into the return envelope for mailing back to us to process. If you want to include a note or other information, put that into the large return envelope. Try to make sure that no contamination occurs with this return envelope either. We received the envelope shown below in the mail and after testing, one result was incorrect and one was undetermined. The substance had leaked into the swab packaging and contaminated the DNA material.

If you have any suggestions for us on how we might improve our process or just want to let us know how it’s working for you, please do let us know! We really enjoy hearing about you and your dogs!

Thank you so much!

Sherrill

June 28, 2011

Dear InGen customers & friends:

As many of you know, InGen is involved in a patent infringement lawsuit with OptiGen LLC regarding their US method patent for identifying the genetic mutation that causes Progressive Rod-Cone Degeneration (pra-PRCD) in many breeds of dogs. I have been asked by many customers to provide an update as to how this lawsuit in unfolding.

This lawsuit was filed about two years ago and is under the jurisdiction of the United States District Court, Northern District of New York and is being heard by Judge Glenn T. Suddaby. As with any such lawsuit, this case has been winding its way through the court system. Given a large amount of recently decided patent cases that deal with methods, we are confident that InGen, a corporation chartered in the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is NOT infringing on ANY patented method in the USA. This being the case, InGen requested a motion of Summary Judgment by Judge Suddaby. A total Summary Judgment decision in InGen’s favor would have resulted in a dismissal of all of the infringement complaints towards InGen. In late February of this year, Judge Suddaby dismissed 2 of the 3 InGen infringement claims. This left the claim involving U.S.C. 35/271 (a) to be decided by a jury trial that is expected to commence sometime this fall. If interested, you can read Judge Suddaby’s Summary Judgment decision here.

The OptiGen lawsuit has been a long, arduous and expensive journey that has consumed a lion’s share of our resources. But I want to reassure all of our customers that InGen is committed to fighting this lawsuit to the end and we are confident in a successful conclusion. If we were not, InGen would have given this fight up.  We believe the law is on our side.

InGen’s primary goal is to make canine genetic testing affordable and routine. Your continued support and patronage is vital in our quest. Thank you for helping InGen help you breed better dogs.

Rick Dobbins, GM

International Genetics, Inc

 

June 9, 2011

GREETINGS!


It’s been a busy spring here at InGen. We have been implementing many new improvements to our system. Although most of these are "behind the scenes" type of improvements, many of you have noticed our much improved turnaround time on your results. I know many of you are rolling your eyes about right now because I have touted our turnaround time before and then something happens that delays our processing routine. But over the last few months since we ironed out the wrinkles with our new lab partner, AZCO BioTech, we have quietly gotten our turnaround time below 4 weeks on average and under 3 weeks in some cases. Click here to see a graph that displays our progress in this area. The data here shows the turnaround time on finished results starting on the day we received the samples from our customer. We receive many samples each day so this chart represents the turnaround time for the grouping of samples received on the particular day listed on the graph. Also, if a sample produces an Undetermined Result, it is not included in the data. Poor sample collection is beyond our control. As you can see, we have made progress in the area our customers complain about the most.

There are other improvements and announcements coming soon, so please be on the lookout for new InGen information.

Once again I thank all of you for your support and business. InGen's mission is to help you breed better dogs by offering a cost effective genetic testing alternative.

Rick Dobbins, GM
InGen

 

April 6, 2011

 

BIG CHANGES AT INGEN!!!

 

International Genetics, Inc. has formed a formal business relationship with AZCO Biotech of San Diego, CA (www.azcobiotech.com) to perform DNA extraction services, new product development and general consulting. Although InGen had been using the services of a vendor lab in Texas for the last year to handle these duties, this lab was relatively small which affected the turnaround time needed by our customers. AZCO is a full service commercial genetics laboratory which gives InGen a more robust facility to quickly extract DNA from the swab brushes returned by our customers. This has been a huge bottleneck in our process and we should now be able to become more competitive in the time it takes to receive, process and post test results. AZCO will also give InGen a greater ability to develop new test products. We will have a new product announcement coming in the next week or so.

 

The change over from our old lab to AZCO did not come without some transitional issues. We had estimated a one month transitional period. But it took closer to 3 months for AZCO to develop its extraction protocol. This did delay some tests. But we are now fully caught up and are posting tests that fall under the 30 day processing time from receipt.

 

InGen now has a laboratory relationship that is equal to that of our previous relationship with Texas A&M. New products and greater efficiencies are in our future. To all our existing customers, thank you for your business. And to those waiting to give us a try, now is a great time to purchase our cost effective canine genetic tests.

 

Thank you for helping us help you breed better dogs!

 

Rick Dobbins, GM

InGen

February 24, 2011 – 5:50PM

Dear InGen Customers:

On Wednesday, February 16, International Genetics experienced a massive server failure at our facility in Nassau. It has taken us a full week to become operational again. We wanted to let you know that our website, store and customer portal are now fully operational. There is a problem with the code that generates the certificates, but this is being corrected now and should be complete in the next few hours.

InGen is an internet based business and almost every aspect of our business is carried out through our server. Not only did the server crash affect our normal online operations, it affected our email, phone service and test processing. All of our capabilities have now been fully restored.

It is believed that our server was hacked by professionals with malicious intent. Although it is still early in the process, our IT contractor, who has been working non-stop on this problem for the last week, has seen where the Trojan Horse InGen was infected with was designed to not only destroy our database but to also destroy our redundant backups. Fortunately, we have numerous backups, both online and off.

BE ADVISED THAT NO CREDIT CARD INFORMATION OR OTHER PERSONAL DATA WAS COMPROMISED. InGen uses Global Collect as our Merchant Services provider and Global Collect keeps all credit card information. Global Collect was in no way involved in this hacking. InGen does not and never has collected any customer credit card information. It does not appear that any of your other information such as address, phone number, email address, dog’s information/test results was violated or compromised in any way.

InGen has filed a criminal complaint with the FBI concerning this matter. From the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), we have filed complaint number I1102211525165432. We will keep everyone informed as to the progress of the investigation.

The last week has been very stressful and hectic for all of us at InGen. Although we did maintain the integrity of our database, resetting all of the links and other related infrastructure took a lot of time and effort. Please take a few minutes to check out your portal to make sure all your data has been maintained correctly. If you have sent us an email and have not received an answer, please send those again as we also lost all of this when the server went down.

Thank you for all the patience you have given us through this ordeal. We hope this has not caused you any great inconvenience. Thank you for your past and future business.

Rick Dobbins, GM

MAY 2010 NEWS

 

Dear InGen Customers:

 

We are still here. In Business. And getting samples processed and posted. That seems to be the answer to the typical question we receive. Oh, and “where are my results?” These make up 95% of the emails we receive on any given day. And we are doing our best to respond to as many emails as we possibly can. However, it is difficult given our meager customer service budget. But we are making huge strides (by our standards, anyway). Please give me a couple of minutes while I bring you up to speed on where InGen is and where we are going.

 

PROCESSING

We believe we have fixed all of our nagging problems. Our internal DNA extraction lab is working well and producing DNA with more than sufficient genetic concentrations. Our undetermined rate has dropped to less than 3%. With extractions now completely under InGen’s control, not only is this shaving a huge amount of time off our turn around time but it has eliminated an area where our competition can intimidate our vendors due to the ongoing lawsuit. Also some hardware issues in Freeport have also been resolved. For the last month, everything seems to be working as well as possible. This has probably been the best stretch of time InGen has had since Texas A&M terminated our processing contract due to the OptiGen lawsuit.

 

Click Here to see a list of test processed since April 1, 2010 where you can see our progress.

 

THE LAWSUIT

Speaking of the lawsuit, the OptiGen v. InGen litigation is entering a critical phase. The discovery phase is, for the most part, over. For those of you that have been unfortunate enough to have been sued, this is probably one of the most time consuming and dangerous segments of a lawsuit. Dangerous because the defendant must produce a huge amount of information like emails, letters, contracts, etc. There are literally 1000’s of pages of documents. And although InGen has absolutely nothing to hide, we must still go over every page to make sure we are not disclosing a password or account number that could be disastrous if not redacted and ending up in the wrong hands. So this is mostly over. Now we are waiting on the judge’s decision on InGen’s motion for a Summary Judgment. Although one never knows what can happen in any type of lawsuit, we are very confident that we have made a strong case that this lawsuit has no merit and should be dismissed. This decision could be made anytime within the next 4 -8 weeks. Once done, this will free up much capital which will be used to make InGen as efficient as possible.

 

THE FUTURE

First, we are processing our backlog as fast as possible and hopefully will be completely caught up in a few weeks. I will admit it. We got over whelmed and over our heads from a processing perspective. If everything had fallen together as planned, I think we would have been caught up months ago. But sometimes life throws curve balls. And we certainly have had our share. But we are standing firm and will not only fulfill all of our obligations, but will be here for the long term giving breeders a cost effective genetic testing alternative that is so desperately needed. I know many of you are VERY disappointed (to say the least) in InGen. All I can ask right now is to please keep an open mind looking into the future. Once we can show that we have finally developed a track record of On-Time testing, please give us another chance.

 

For those of you that may not have read the History of InGen yet, please click this link:

 

http://ingen.bs/news.html

 

Again, thank you for your time, patience and any future business!!!

 

Rick Dobbins, GM

InGen

 

April 12, 2010

IT WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SO HARD

A history of International Genetics, Inc and PinPoint DNA Technologies

My name is Rick Dobbins and I am the CEO of International Genetics, Inc (InGen) and PinPoint DNA Technologies. I am writing this historical record of my involvement in both companies to try to answer questions and accusations that have been leveled at both me personally and my companies. Although I am sure this will not sooth all of our customer’s complaints and problems with InGen and myself, I hope to convey to all who read this that my intentions have been, are presently and will continue to be honorable.

I hope the following will give readers an insight on the history of InGen, the issues we have and are facing and where we hope to go in the future. I will give as many details as I think are relevant to this discussion. However, given the tone of some of the emails & phone calls we receive; there will be some details that I will omit due to privacy concerns.

PART 1                     Who is Rick Dobbins?

I was born in 1959 in Atlanta, GA where I live today with my wife Jill, son Mac and Golden Retriever, Elle. I have been involved with several businesses over the years including some real estate development and a consulting business that works for banks and commercial finance companies handling commercial foreclosure & bankruptcy issues. Given the downturn in the economy, this is an area where I am very busy at the moment.

My sister-in-law, Lisa Bowman, is a breeder of champion Australian Cattle Dogs. It was from learning about her breeding operation and the issues breeders face in trying to make a profit (a very hard thing to do) where I came up with my initial business idea for PinPoint and then, InGen. That was in 2005.

Although I am not a PhD and have no real training in genetics other than some biology classes in high school & college, I have always had a fascination with DNA. I am also a huge dog lover; having had Labrador & Golden Retrievers my entire life.

I was very fortunate to meet several PhD’s that helped mold the business plan into what it is today. It was through these contacts that our initial involvement with Texas A&M developed all the way to our present partnership with Chela Tech Labs in The Bahamas.

PART 2                     PinPoint DNA Technologies, Inc

PinPoint is my Georgia Corporation that was the original business founded to sell and report DNA genetic testing. PinPoint partnered with Dr. Melba Ketchum who owns DNA Diagnostic Labs d/b/a Shelterwood Labs in Timpson, Texas. Dr. Ketchum had a friend who ran the Equine Genetics Lab (now called the Animal Genetics Lab) at Texas A&M University. Gus Cothran, PhD and Dr. Ketchum agreed through written contract to help develop Pinpoint’s initial genetic test product called Pawsitive I.D.™ (PID). Dr. Ketchum had a patent pending testing method called VeriSNP™ that we had an exclusive use of for canine testing. VeriSNP™ is/was a method that enabled the simultaneous processing of many genetic tests at one time. When we rolled PID out, we were able to process 128 different canine genetic tests at one time using SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) technology. It truly was a unique testing platform.

During the development of PID, it was determined that there was a very popular genetic test for the identification of the genetic mutation for Progressive Rod-Cone Degeneration (PRCD). This test had been around for about 10 years at the time and was only offered by a company named OptiGen. The PRCD test had been developed and patented by Cornell University and licensed to OptiGen. OptiGen, with its monopoly on this important genetic eye test, charged as much as $195 or more for each test. After reviewing the patent issued approximately in 1998, Dr. Ketchum, Dr. Cothran and myself determined that the older technology cited in this patent was not anywhere near what we were doing with SNP’s and it was decided that we would offer the PRCD test along with the other 127 tests on the PID platform.

PID was launched in August of 2007 and the PRCD portion became an immediate hit. Along with PRCD, PID had a 60 marker DNA fingerprint, 30+ other genetic disease screening tests and several color tests. This was presented on a nicely printed Certificate of Genotyping that we mailed to all of our customers after processing. PID worked very well until February 2008.

PART 3                     OptiGen

Needless to say, OptiGen was not thrilled about our entry into the PRCD market. My first contact with OptiGen occurred in September 2007 when Jeanette Felix of OptiGen called to inform me of their PRCD patent. Although we had a pleasant conversation, I told her we did not believe we were infringing on this patent due to the newer technology we were using. I did receive a letter directly from Dr. Felix a few days later but heard nothing from OptiGen or their attorneys until early February 2008. It was at this time PinPoint received a cease & desist letter from OptiGen’s attorneys informing PinPoint of OptiGen’s most recent patent for PRCD issued on Christmas Day 2007. This patent did address the technology issues not found in the 1998 patent. PinPoint, along with Dr. Ketchum, undertook a patent evaluation by Stern, Kessler, et al of Washington, DC to see where we were legally. Although there was no determination that PinPoint had infringed on either of the patents, it was determined that the patents were very broad and the possibility of a “work around” was not great. The only other avenue would be to either try to invalidate the patent(s) by researching for “prior art” or to continue to sell the test product and face an almost sure patent infringement lawsuit. Due to financial issues, PinPoint could do neither. So it was determined that PinPoint would withdraw the PRCD portion of the PID test as of April 1, 2008. This was done with almost universal disappointment from our customer base. People were actually begging me to come up with a solution. Which I did.

Part 4                       InGen

After researching OptiGen’s patents, it was discovered that they had patent rights in the USA, Canada, European Union,and Australia. Of course this is where the lion’s share of the business is located. In order to legally offer this genetic test in any of these jurisdictions, several criteria had to be met. First, one could not practice THE METHOD for testing that was described in the patent(s). Secondly, one could not SELL or OFFER FOR SALE the method described in the patent(s). And thirdly, the business that would be promoting and selling the genetic tests in question needed to be established in a jurisdiction not covered by the patent(s). I had a solution for each of these criteria.

So the question then became – do I want to take the chance? Do I want to take on OptiGen with an almost sure to be filed patent infringement lawsuit? This was all happening around the spring of 2008, before the national/worldwide financial meltdown. After looking at what is most certainly a huge market for affordable canine genetic testing; and being a dog lover; and wanting to make a positive mark on the health of dogs; and after many discussions with Dr. Ketchum, Dr. Cothran and my other consultants; and after establishing a relationship with Chela-Tech Labs in The Bahamas, I rolled the dice and started InGen.

InGen established an International Business Company (IBC) in The Bahamas. We built a laboratory at Chela-Tech’s lab in Freeport for our PCR (Polychromase Chain Reaction) testing (This is the method portion of OptiGen’s patent). The server we have running our website is located in Nassau. When a customer goes to our website, the session is hosted off shore in Nassau. When the customer purchases our test products, they must go through an international credit card processor called Global Collect. The funds are then sent to our bank located in St. Vincent named Loyal Bank. And when our customer receives their finished test results, they must go back into our international website and download the certificate for the individual dog being tested. InGen is international in every facet of its business.

In December of 2008, InGen began selling the PID platform with Premium & Non-Premium tests. The Premium Tests consisted, at the time, of just the pra-PRCD test. The Non-Premium tests consisted of all the other tests previously offered plus a few new tests Dr. Ketchum & Cothran wanted to add.

In January 2009, OptiGen filed the first lawsuit against InGen.

PART 5                     The Lawsuits

As expected, OptiGen filed suit against InGen, PinPoint, Genetic Fulfillment (The company that does the shipping in the US) and me personally in January 2009. This was for alleged infringement of OptiGen’s two patents for PRCD. Again, this was expected. We just did not know exactly how they were going to come at us. The suit against InGen, a Bahamian IBC, has very little chance of success to OptiGen. We covered all the bases as mentioned previously. Bringing Genetic Fulfillment into the suit was strictly as a nuisance. GF does nothing that can be described as infringement. PinPoint may have some infringement liability due to its selling the PRCD test up until April 1, 2008. But Dr. Ketchum & Texas A&M did the testing, not PinPoint. And they brought me personally into the suit to try to pierce the corporate veil and make me liable for the actions of PinPoint and InGen.

All of this was expected. What was not expected was the 2nd lawsuit that named, in addition to my parties, Texas A&M and Melba Ketchum. This suit was not for PRCD, but for 3 other tests that Dr. Ketchum & Dr. Cothran insisted that we add to PID as Non-Premium tests. These tests were for Alport Syndrome, Canine Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency in Dogs (CLAD) and Congenital Stationary Night Blindness (CSNB) In Dogs. Whether these tests were actually offered on the PID platform has not been definitively determined. Alport was allegedly done under another name and CSNB was never actually part of the PID platform. CLAD was briefly part of the PID but was taken off immediately after notification of the 2nd lawsuit. Here again, these tests were thought to not have any patent protections. It was Dr. Ketchum’s responsibility to determine this, which obviously was not done properly. Per our written, signed contract, Dr. Ketchum had expressly committed to PinPoint that none of the genetic tests she (or Texas A&M) would process or provide would have any proprietary issues or require license. This apparently was not the case in regard to the 2nd lawsuit.

How are the lawsuits going? Well the one for PRCD is going as planned and we expect a resolution in our favor soon. What has caused us the most problems is the 2nd lawsuit. Up until August 2009, our relationship with Texas A&M had been fruitful and although not completely without problems, the system we had developed was working. A&M was doing all of our extractions and providing science consulting. But a few months after the filing of the 2nd lawsuit, Texas A&M terminated our written contract without adhering to the 90 day notice of cancelation clause. This caused us many problems as I will describe shortly. OptiGen has since settled with Texas A&M and is close to a settlement with Melba Ketchum. OptiGen’s obvious objective here was to divide & conquer. The divide part worked well. The conquer part is yet to be seen.

PART 6                     How InGen Works

This is what happens when you purchase an InGen Test:

  • The customer goes to www.ingen.bs (bs is the extension for The Bahamas, not what some people think) and buys a genetic test.
  • The transaction is handled by Global Collect which processes all credit card transactions.
  • Genetic Fulfillment, LLC then fulfills the order by sending sample collection kits via Federal Express.
  • The customer receives the collection kit, collects the sample and sends it back to Genetic Fulfillment.
  • GF scans samples into our system and batches the sample with others to send to the DNA extraction Lab. (note: this function was originally handled by Dr. Ketchum and then Texas A&M. DNA International Laboratories in Florida did this from September 2009 until February 2010 and is now being done internally by InGen.)
  • After extraction, the samples are sent to our facility in Freeport, The Bahamas. InGen partners with Chela-Tech Labs of The Bahamas which supplies lab space & technicians.
  • The PCR process is then conducted in Freeport. Once a successful plate of samples is run, an Excel spreadsheet is generated and sent to Sherrill Williams where she does some final Quality Control checks and uploads the data into the customer’s personal portal on the InGen website.
  • Customers are alerted by email that their results have been posted and they are then able to go to their page and print out the results. If all tests have been processed, this is the end of the sale/testing process.

PART 7                     Problems

As with any start up, there are always problems. And with a Bahamian company that was going to have to deal with all the issues that come with setting up an international corporation AND infringement litigation, we knew going in that there would be more than our share of problems. But I never imagined that we would have the litany of issues we have had to deal with. Here is what PinPoint/InGen has dealt with and how we have handled the situations:

January 2008               Received cease & desist letter from OptiGen for PRCD. We had to terminate testing for PRCD on April 1, 2008.

April thru July 2008       Melba Ketchum became very tardy in extracting PinPoint’s DNA samples. This was the first period of delays that caused severe customer service problems. We then came to an agreement with Texas A&M to handle this process as well as the PID testing.

April 2009                    The ABI 7000 RTPCR Instrument in Freeport experienced a sever power surge that burned the circuit board. This required replacement of the instrument which was time consuming and very expensive. This took about two weeks to determine what the problem was and another 4 weeks for a replacement to arrive and to properly set up. This resulted in another processing delay. We have since purchased another ABI 7000 which is located in Nassau for redundancy purposes.

April 2009                    The 2nd lawsuit was filed and this was the final straw between Dr. Ketchum and InGen. Due to Dr. Ketchum’s failure to properly research certain tests that are allegedly protected by patent, InGen was drawn into another lawsuit which eventually led to the early termination of the contract between InGen and Texas A&M. InGen severed its relationship with Dr. Ketchum which was the best thing that has come from that suit.

May 2009                    We saw the writing on the wall and decided we needed to drastically change our testing platform and focus only on the genetic tests dog breeders actually wanted. We decided to eliminate the PID platform and the VeriSNP™ process and concentrate on only 5 genetic tests – pra-PRCD, vWD, EIC, MDR1 & DM. This took several weeks to put into place but was finally rolled out in mid July 2009.

July 2009                     With no warning at all, Texas A&M terminated our written contract in late July 2009. This is spite of the fact we had a 90 day notification of termination period by written contract and that we had verbal commitments from Dr. Cothran that we would continue to work together for at least several months. A&M’s attorneys were to blame for this, not Dr. Cothran. A&M at this time was only providing extraction services and consulting. But this premature termination was not expected and caused us great confusion at a time we were just getting our new platform up & running. We were able to establish a relationship with DNA International Labs in Florida who performed DNA extraction services for us. We also began a relationship with Dr. Ashley Hall, a geneticist, to act as a consultant. However, it took over a month to get the process working smoothly again.

October 2009               Although we had several weeks of good testing after the addition of DNA International labs and Dr. Hall to our team, we suddenly started having processing problems. It took a few weeks to determine that we had had a massive contamination problem in the lab. This was very difficult to fix. We had every square inch of the lab washed down with bleach. We serviced the air conditioning system. We replaced every consumable item we had. We installed an expensive environmental chamber with UV sterilization. We did all of this but it took time to fix. We did not get a good sample run until early December, over two months after we determined we had contamination. This has been the single most time consuming problem we have had and it caused delays from which we still have not fully recovered.

January 2010               Due to the OptiGen lawsuit, OptiGen sent our extraction lab vendor, DNA International Labs, a threatening letter describing DNA Labs potential liabilities. Upon receipt of this letter, the owner of DNA International Labs informed me of his desire to terminate our extraction contract. Due to OptiGen’s harassment of InGen’s extraction vendors, this contract termination resulted in a hindrance of our processing and caused further delays in our testing schedule. It was decided at this time we HAD to do the extractions in house. We began construction of our extraction lab in mid February and by mid March, we were getting good DNA extractions. This should eliminate one of our biggest problems to date and should help us get to the point we can get our samples processed under a month from receipt.

PART 8                     InGen’s Current Situation

The purpose for me in putting this chronological order of events together is to let you, our customers, know what has happened, what is happening and what we hope to accomplish in the future. We know we have let many people down and will have a very difficult time getting many, if any of you to give us another chance in the future. I take full responsibility for everything that has happened. I also know that the lack of customer service, which again, I take full responsibility for, has been our biggest issue with many of you. Please take this out on me. But please know, I am not a dishonest person. I want nothing more than to fulfill my obligations. And I know if I can’t, then I will go out of business and lose a very substantial investment. From some of the emails I see and postings on Face Book, many think I am making huge money from these $60 genetic tests. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our business plan was always to make money with volume. InGen has yet to sell enough genetic tests to make any money. But we intend to. We will get through these problems and be able to show our customers very soon that we can get samples processed and posted within 30 days. And when the OptiGen lawsuit is adjudicated in our favor, this will free up substantial funds and time to make InGen as efficient as possible.

We are currently getting tests processed, albeit excruciatingly slow.
Your samples will be processed as soon as possible.

I know many of you have no intention of using InGen ever again. I can understand that. But I’m asking that you try to keep an open mind and if we can prove to you within in the next 6 months that we can actually fulfill our obligations, then maybe you will give us another chance.

Thank you for your time in reading this, for your past business and patience, and for any chance of future business.

Rick Dobbins, GM

International Genetics, Inc.

 

January 16, 2009

Dear Customers,

International Genetics, Inc. is currently being sued for patent infringement from its competitor, OptiGen, Inc of Ithaca, NY. I would like to reassure all customers that that this was totally expected and that this suit will not affect the current day-to-day operations or testing facilities connected to InGen. All current and future tests will be processed as promised without delay.

InGen is a corporation operating in the Bahamas and conducting certain genetic tests using a method that is patent protected in the United States, Canada and European Union. Given that the patent in question was never applied for or issued in The Bahamas, InGen is totally within its legal rights to perform this method in a jurisdiction not covered by the patent.  A patent is a negative right. In other words, it gives the patent holder or licensee the right to keep someone else from using the patented product or method in the jurisdiction covered by the patent. Given that OptiGen does not have any patent for any method in The Bahamas, InGen is legally able to use this scientific method.

Extensive research went into the decision to open our lab in Freeport. We are certain that we will prevail in this suit. Actually, we welcome this lawsuit. Once we have established that this is indeed not patent infringement, the cost of genetic testing overall by many labs should be reduced. This is a win-win for breeders.

Our case is strong and we are well funded.  However, this lawsuit could go on for years. We will keep our customers completely up to date as to the significant events which result from this case. Your continued business and support will be of great help in helping us see this case to its ultimate end. And we are confident that the end result will be in our favor.

Thank you for your past, current and future business!!!

Rick Dobbins, GM

International Genetics, Inc