European Patent Office to Grant BioKey’s Patent Application for Foundational HYFT Technology

Immunoprecise Antibodies Ltd. (NASDAQ: IPA) (“Immunoprecise” or “IPA” or the “Company”), the parent company of BioKey and affiliate of BioStrand, announced today that the EPO has issued a “Decision to Grant” for BioKey’s patent application covering the company’s HYFT Technology used to organize and analyze biological sequence information. The HYFT Technology and methodology provide a novel way to efficiently tap into sequence information, allowing the extraction and use the relevant information therein to address the current problems in omics data integration and analysis. The HYFT Technology serves as the core of the BioStrand’s LENS^ai Integrated Technology^TM platform which provides cutting-edge data solutions and antibody discovery.

The patent will provide BioStrand’s LENS^ai Integrated Technology with broad protection, further strengthening the Company’s patent portfolio position and enabling exclusive access to the HYFT Technology. The Company anticipates favorable outcomes in other countries as well, as many patent offices worldwide consider the status of related European cases to be highly relevant to the decision to grant patents.

“This is a significant and exciting decision by the EPO, and we view this announcement as a recognition of BioStrand’s important contributions to the fields of omic data integration and analysis, fields paramount to the future of cancer research, precision medicine, biomarker identification, and novel drug discovery and development,” stated Dr. Jennifer Bath, CEO of IPA. “This patent provides protection for BioKey’s HYFT Technology, which will give scientists the ability to advance the development of safer and more effective therapies for the toughest medical challenges we face today.”

The HYFT Technology

HYFT Technology is a way of organizing information about the natural world by creating connections between patterns found in living things, called HYFTs. These patterns can link genetic sequences to their structures and functions, as well as to other information such as scientific papers and medical records. The output, the HYFT knowledge graph, contains over 660 million patterns and 25 billion connections, and is continuously updated with new information. This provides a powerful tool for exploring relationships in the natural world, which can be used for research and applications in medicine and other fields. The HYFT graph is unique in its explicit representation of information from the whole biosphere, and it provides a transparent intermediate layer between sequences and predictions that allows for new knowledge to be extracted without the limitations of a black box.