The Supreme Court decision that's shaking up biotech

In biotech, your company is only as good as its intellectual property. And the Supreme Court on Monday left a whole lot of biotech entrepreneurs fearful that their inventions may not be worth all that much after all.

The justices spooked the industry by declining to hear an appeal from Sequenom, a California company that markets a prenatal test based on screening fetal DNA. A lower court had ruled that Sequenom couldn’t patent the test because it was based on a natural biological process.

Now that the Supreme Court won’t hear the case, the prior ruling stands — to the dismay not just of Sequenom, but of startups and giants across the life sciences, including Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Novartis, all of which had begged the justices to intervene.

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