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The Mayo Clinic and its lawyers at Mayer Brown weren't the only ones to welcome the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling Tuesday that Prometheus Laboratories cannot patent a medical test that relies on correlations between drug dosages and treatment. Lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union see the high court's unanimous decision as a good omen for their own case challenging the patentability of human genes.
The plaintiffs in both cases have relied on the same argument: that the patents in dispute are naturally occurring phenomena that do not qualify for patent protection. The Supreme Court bought that argument wholeheartedly in Mayo's case.
"We conclude that the patent claims at issue here effectively claim the underlying laws of nature themselves. Those claims are consequently invalid," wrote Justice Stephen Breyer. Just as Einstein could not have patented E=mc2 and Newton could not have laid claim to the law of gravity, Breyer wrote, so Prometheus cannot patent a test kit that correlates a patient's blood chemistry with the best drug dosages for treatment. The decision overturned a ruling by the U.S. Court...
The plaintiffs in both cases have relied on the same argument: that the patents in dispute are naturally occurring phenomena that do not qualify for patent protection. The Supreme Court bought that argument wholeheartedly in Mayo's case.
"We conclude that the patent claims at issue here effectively claim the underlying laws of nature themselves. Those claims are consequently invalid," wrote Justice Stephen Breyer. Just as Einstein could not have patented E=mc2 and Newton could not have laid claim to the law of gravity, Breyer wrote, so Prometheus cannot patent a test kit that correlates a patient's blood chemistry with the best drug dosages for treatment. The decision overturned a ruling by the U.S. Court...