Patent revoked in its entirety. Court to examine its international jurisdiction of its own motion. The parties are not the same for the purposes of Articles 29 and 31 Brussels I recast Regulation. The fact that both parties belong to the same group of companies and have the same parent company is insufficient to conclude that their interests are, even though they may be to a large extent aligned, identical and indissociable. The Court will not stay the related revocation action (Article 30 Brussel I recast, R. 295m RoP). The reasons listed, the interests of the parties and procedural economy outweigh the risk that UPC CoA and BGH proceedings may become pending in parallel (and the related risk of contradictory decisions). Assessment of novelty (Article 54 EPC) requires the determination of the whole content of the prior publication. It is decisive whether the subject-matter of the claim with all its features is directly and unambiguously disclosed in the prior art citation. Applying the above standard to the case at hand, the Central Division comes to the conclusion that the subject matter of claim 1 of the Patent as granted lacks novelty over document D10, Göransson et al. Inadmissible new auxiliary request maintaining all the auxiliary requests already proposed in the application to amend that was made in the Statement of Defence (R. 30 RoP, R. 50 RoP) Under the front-loaded system of UPC proceedings parties are under an obligation to set out their full case as early as possible (Preamble RoP 7, last sentence). The subsequent application to amend was filed late in the proceedings, after closure of the written proceedings and after the interim conference, less than 1.5 months before the (at the time scheduled) oral hearing. Auxiliary request 1 lacks inventive step (article 56 EPC). Starting from Göransson, it was in the view of the Central Division obvious for the skilled person at the priority date to transfer the method of Göransson to an in situ context, for instance in FISH, to detect e.g. RNA or proteins, thereby arriving at the claimed subject matter.
