Podcast: Owner's Outlook: National Trends in Construction Claims - Diagnosing Health Care
Federal Circuit Hands Down Modified Opinion in Illumina, Inc. v. Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc. Earlier this year, the Federal Circuit (somewhat surprisingly) found claims of two Sequenom patents directed to methods for...more
Is a new method of diagnosing a disease patentable? Can it survive a motion to dismiss? And, irrespective of the current precedent, should a new method of diagnosing a disease be patentable? These are questions the U.S. Court...more
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
Ever since the Supreme Court's decision in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories was handed down in 2012, diagnostic method claims have been routinely invalidated by the district courts and those decisions...more
The cloud of uncertainty over patent eligibility of patents for medical diagnostic methods remains. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined the opportunity to revisit patent eligibility under its two-step Mayo test when it...more
On January 13, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in the following cases...more
On Jan. 10, the Supreme Court will decide whether it will review the Federal Circuit's decisions in the Athena v. Mayo, HP Inc. v. Berkheimer and Hikma v. Vanda cases. The Solicitor General, at the invitation of the Supreme...more
On Friday I will be speaking at the AUTM Eastern Regional Meeting, on a panel discussing patent eligibility issues for life sciences inventions. My topic relates to what the USPTO refers to as “nature-based products,” but...more
In a remarkable collection of opinions that have no direct effect on the law, the Federal Circuit has implicitly given its support to efforts in Congress to override the Supreme Court’s decision in Mayo v. Prometheus, which...more
As discussed in a previous blog post, since Mayo v. Prometheus, critics of medical treatment patents have advocated that such patents should be banned from patenting. While such arguments seemed futile based on the consistent...more
In an opinion evidencing the split in opinion regarding the patent eligibility of diagnostic methods, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied a petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc, leaving in...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
The federal appeals court with jurisdiction over questions of patent law has consistently held that methods of diagnosing a disease or other biological condition violate the Supreme Court’s ban on patenting “natural...more
In Genetic Veterinary Sciences, Inc. v. Laboklin GMBH & Co., the Federal Circuit upheld the district court decision that held claims directed to methods for genotyping a Labrador Retriever invalid under 35 USC § 101 at the...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
Federal Circuit Determines Time-Barred Petitioner Joined to an IPR Has Appellate Standing - In Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. v. Research Corporation Tech., Appeal Nos. 2017-2088, -2089, -2091, the Federal Circuit held that a...more
In Athena Diagnostics Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Services, LLC, the Federal Circuit has once again held that claims directed to a diagnostic method are invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 for being directed to ineligible subject...more
On February 6, 2019, the Federal Circuit decided Athena Diagnostics, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Services, LLC, affirming a District Court for the District of Massachusetts decision that the claims at issue were patent...more
Federal Circuit Summaries - Before Judge Newman, Lourie and Stoll. Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Summary: Claims reciting only conventional steps to detect a natural...more
In Athena Diagnostics, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Services, a divided panel of the Federal Circuit has provided another guidepost in the search for patent-eligible subject matter in the diagnostic industry. The Court upheld a...more
The Federal Circuit recently affirmed a decision from the District Court for the Northern District of California granting appellee Cepheid’s summary judgment motion against appellant Roche Molecular Systems (“Roche”) and held...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 Supreme Court decisions in Myriad and Mayo have been applied to diagnostic-type claims, method of treatment patents were thought to be safe from the recent judicial expansion of the patent-(in)eligibility doctrine....more