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A U.S. appeals court said on Friday that the discovery of a new form of prenatal testing that avoids the risks of invasive medical techniques was good for science but did not deserve a patent.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the District of Columbia said a patent held by genetic testing company Sequenom Inc on detecting fetal DNA in a pregnant woman's blood was invalid. The decision by the nation's top patent court upholds a ruling by a lower federal court in California and clears Roche Holding AG unit Ariosa Diagnostics of infringement.

The appeals said the DNA's presence in the blood fell under the U.S. Supreme Court's rule against patenting natural phenomena.

The decision is the latest to interpret two Supreme Court decisions from 2012 and 2013 that made it harder to obtain patents on naturally occurring substances and the tests used to detect them, potentially putting a wide swath of biotech patents at risk.

Sequenom's innovation was in finding a way to use DNA found in maternal blood samples that had...