Podcast: Owner's Outlook: National Trends in Construction Claims - Diagnosing Health Care
The Federal Circuit held that two patents directed to methods of preparing samples for use in diagnostic methods are patent eligible under Section 101, reversing a decision from the District Court for the Northern District of...more
Broad Claim Language and Unpredictability in the Art Lead to Non-Enablement - In Enzo Life Sciences, Inc. v. Roche Molecular Systems, Inc., Appeal Nos. 2017-2498, -2499, -2545, -2546, broad patent claims were invalid as...more
Just Because Something May Result From a Prior Art Teaching Does Not Make it Inherent in that Teaching - In Personal Web Technologies, LLC v. Apple, Inc., Appeal No. 2018-1599, the Federal Circuit clarified that the mere...more
A method of diagnosing neurological disorders invented by researchers at Oxford University and the Max-Planck Society was found patent ineligible by the Federal Circuit in the case Athena Diagnostics, Inc. v. Mayo...more
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Mayo and Alice decisions, uncertainty has surrounded what inventions are patent eligible in the United States. In Mayo and Alice, the Supreme Court developed a two-step test to determine...more
Federal Circuit Summary - Before O’Malley, Reyna, and Hughes. Appeal from the District Court for the Northern District of California. Summary: Testing for the presence of a bacterium that causes tuberculosis and the...more
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a memorandum on June 7 (the “Memorandum”), providing much-needed guidance to patent examiners as to whether method of treatment claims are to be considered patent-eligible...more
While the patent eligibility of diagnostic method claims remains questionable in the United States, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office has issued updated guidance on the types of diagnostic method claims that can–and...more
On December 5, 2016 the USPTO will hold its second Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Roundtable to discuss issues in patent eligibility. The USPTO published a list of eighteen questions in anticipation of the event, dealing...more
On August 25, 2016, the District Court for the District of Massachusetts denied a motion to dismiss for lack of patent eligible subject matter filed by defendants Mayo Collaborative Services, LLC and Mayo Clinic. Applying the...more
A method of producing a desired population of multi-cryopreserved hepatocytes was held to be patent-eligible because the challenged claims did not recite a judicial exception. Rapid Litig. v. CellzDirect, Inc.., 2015-1570...more
Last week the United States Supreme Court denied Sequenom’s petition to review the Federal Circuit’s holding in Sequenom Inc. v. Ariosa Diagnostic Inc., 788 F.3d 1371 (2015) that claims directed to detecting fetal DNA in...more
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied certiorari in Sequenom, Inc. v. Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc. (No. 15-1182), declining to review the Federal Circuit’s June 12, 2015, decision that certain methods of detecting paternally...more
The United States Supreme Court is set to render its decision on the grant or denial of Sequenom, Inc.’s (“Sequenom’s”) petition for writ of certiorari that posed the issue: ..Whether a novel method is patent-eligible...more
In Genetic Techs Ltd v Merial LLC (Fed. Cir., April 8, 2016), the Federal Circuit invalidated yet another diagnostic patent for failing to satisfy 35 U.S.C. § 101 on the ground that the claims recite nothing more than a law...more
Striking another blow against patent eligibility in the field of biotechnology, the Federal Circuit agreed with the district court that methods that use “junk DNA” to detect genetic variations lack patent eligibility under 35...more
Judge Gaughan of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss after finding three Cleveland Clinic Foundation diagnostic patents invalid under 35 USC § 101. While the...more
Personalized medicine relies on diagnostic technologies to accurately evaluate a patient’s clinical or genetic signature to guide treatment decisions. Protecting innovation by patenting the diagnostic methods and tools that...more