Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Biotech Industry Left Floundering, Dismayed After High Court Passes On Patent Eligibility Case
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鈥檛 patent the test because it was based on a natural biological process. (Garde, 6/27)
In June 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington agreed with Sequenom that the patented method "revolutionized" prenatal care, but nonetheless upheld the patent's cancellation. The ruling cited a Supreme Court decision from 2012, Mayo v. Prometheus, that made it harder to obtain patents on natural phenomena or substances. (Chung, 6/27)
