In this issue: Getting the Prescription Right for Patenting Personalized Medicine Innovations; Uniloc v. Microsoft: Federal Circuit Rules on Reasonable Royalty Damages Issues; and more.

Excerpt from 'Getting the Prescription...':

“Personalized medicine” refers to the use of patient-specific information to better inform medical care. Even now, certain DNA sequence information and measures of various “biomarker” levels are used to guide diagnostic or treatment decisions. For example, the life-saving drug Herceptin® can be used as a powerful weapon in the fight against breast cancer. However, its benefits are limited to treating tumors that have a specific genetic anomaly. A simple test detects this anomaly and determines whether Herceptin® therapy will benefit the patient.

Another current example of personalized medicine comes from the cardiovascular field. At the end of 2010, Palo Alto-based CardioDx, a pioneer in the field of cardiovascular genomic diagnostics, announced that Corus™ CAD, the company’s blood-based gene expression test, was honored as one of Time magazine’s “Top Ten Medical Breakthroughs of 2010.” Corus™ CAD is the first and only clinically validated blood-based test to help clinicians confidently identify which of their stable symptomatic patients are likely to need further assessment for obstructive coronary artery disease.