Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Academic Post-Op Of Myriad

The leading patent law blog, Patently-O, solicited short reactions to the U.S. Supreme Court's June 13, 2013, AMP v. Myriad decision from patent law professors.  Patently-O published these micro-opinions hereHere is mine:
Looking at the trend over the past decade, Andrew Torrance (Kansas) writes: "For better or worse, the Supreme Court's AMP v. Myriad decision caps a decade-long trend away from the patentability of the human body, human embryonic stem cells, human physiology, diagnosis of human disease, human thoughts, and, now, human genes."
Ironically, even though the Supreme Court left open the possibility that cDNA sequences might remain patent-eligible, those same sequences will often be patently-o(bvious) in light of existing genomics knowledge and the routine molecular biological techniques used to produce cDNA.