Biotech Industry Left Floundering, Dismayed After High Court Passes On Patent Eligibility Case
Experts say that the Supreme Court's refusal to take up the case about patents and a prenatal test based on a natural biological process could make investors and life sciences companies hesitant to be innovative in the field for fear their inventions won't be worth anything.
Stat:
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. (Garde, 6/27)
Reuters:
Supreme Court Refuses To Review Prenatal Test Patent Dispute
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)
