Australian Appeals Court Upholds Patents on Isolated BRCA1 DNA

On September 5, the Federal Court of Australia (the appeals court) upheld a claim on isolated DNA from the BRCA1 gene. It dismissed Yvonne D’Arcy’s appeal of a case that has attracted international attention. Australian patent 686,004 has never been enforced, so the court decision has little real-world concrete impact. As Richard Gold and Julia Carbone explained in their classic case study, “Myriad Genetics: In the Eye of the Policy Storm,” the patent rights on BRCA1 and BRCA2 were exclusively licensed for use in Australia and New Zealand to Genetic Technologies, Ltd. (GTG), which in turn made them a “gift to the people of Australia.” When the CEO of GTG proposed taking back that gift in the summer of 2008, he provoked a firestorm and the company backed down in October, restating that it would not enforce its patent rights against laboratories offering BRCA testing. The Australian Senate held a series of hearings, and a bill proscribing DNA sequence patents was proposed, but the new government opposed it, and it lapsed. Instead, Australia enacted patent reforms in 2012 that raised...