Biotech Reels Over Patent Ruling
By Erika Check-Hayden,
Nature News
| 07. 08. 2014
Untitled Document
Guidelines that forbid patents on a wide array of natural products, phenomena and principles have many in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries worried about the future of their business.
The rules, issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office in March, are open to public comment until 31 July and are reactions to two recent decisions by the US Supreme Court. In March 2012, the court ruled against Prometheus Laboratories in San Diego, California, saying that the company could not patent metabolite levels used to guide drug dosing. Then, in June 2013, the court rejected a patent claim by Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City, Utah, on DNA sequences linked to breast cancer, opening the door for firms to develop genetic tests of breast-cancer risk. In both cases, the court based its decision on a section of patent code that forbids patenting “laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas”. The guidance now states that patentable inventions must be “significantly different” from any natural product.
The patent office has decided that because the decisions in these cases built...
Related Articles
By Tomoko Otake, The Japan Times | 04.09.2024
A decade ago, researcher Haruko Obokata caused a sensation when she published two papers in the journal Nature, in which she claimed that she had discovered a way to create stem cells easily using the so-called STAP method.
With STAP...
By Eric Schmidt, TIME | 04.16.2024
Imagine a world where everything from plastics to concrete is produced from biomass. Personalized cell and gene therapies prevent pandemics and treat previously incurable genetic diseases. Meat is lab-grown; enhanced nutrient grains are climate-resistant. This is what the future could...
By Tristan Manalac, BioSpace | 04.02.2024
Verve Therapeutics has suspended enrollment in the Phase Ib Heart-1 study evaluating its lead gene editing program VERVE-101 following a serious adverse event, the company announced Tuesday.
A patient, who received a 0.45-mg/kg dose of VERVE-101, developed a grade 3...
By Jason Kehe, Wired | 04.11.2024
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born...