US Supreme Court Asked to Reconsider Gene Patents
By Ruth Saunders,
BioNews
| 10. 01. 2012
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has asked the US Supreme Court to reconsider its decision to uphold the patent held by Myriad Genetics on two human genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancers.
The lawsuit was filed by ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation on behalf of medical associations including the Association for Molecular Pathology, scientists, patients and women's health groups. It is the latest part of an ongoing battle over the validity of the patents held by Myriad Genetics. The lawsuit claims the patents are illegal and will both hamper scientific research and limit accessibility to medical care.
The ruling over the gene patents has been going back and forth since March 2010, when a district court declared the patents invalid, but was later overturned by the Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). The decision was passed on to the Supreme Court, which asked the CAFC to reassess their judgement taking into consideration the Supreme Court's recent ruling against a similar patent.
The genes in question, BRCA1 and BRCA2, can be used to detect the...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Shoumita Dasgupta, STAT | 10.03.2025
President Trump and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have characterized the rise in autism diagnoses in recent years as an epidemic requiring emergency intervention.
This approach is factually wrong: The broadening definition of autism and the improvement in diagnosis...
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...