Posts Tagged: "dna technology"

On Friday, May 11th, Mountain View, CA-based personal genetics testing company 23AndMe filed a lawsuit alleging patent infringement claims against Lehi, UT-based genealogy firm Ancestry.com. The suit, filed in the Northern District of California, targets Ancestry’s use of a DNA testing kit, which allegedly infringes upon a genetic testing patent held by 23AndMe.

The law of patent eligibility is created by the nine least qualified people to make such a determination; the Justices of Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court arbitrarily chooses which of its own prior decisions to follow and ignore, refuses to read and enforce the laws passed by Congress even when the statue is but a single sentence (as is 101), and they openly legislates from the bench by creating judicial exceptions to patent eligibility where no such statutory prerogative exists. If the Federal Circuit will not step up and do the right thing and limit the lawless Mayo decision, which instructs lower courts to ignore the patent statute and drive 100% of the analysis into 101, the U.S. will forfeit our lead in the biotechnology and medical device industries. That will be bad for the economy, but far worse for public health.

There have been signs that Samsung is trying to wind down its operations in its medical device businesses, but we found plenty of patent applications filed with the USPTO indicating that healthcare innovation is still very important to this corporation. A technique for the genetic analysis of human subjects to test for diagnosing certain leukemias is featured by U.S. Patent Application No. 20150038360, titled Method for Multiplex-Detecting Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia Gene Using Cleavable Probe. The kit for detecting an e19a2 breakpoint of a BCR-ABL fusion gene claimed here contains five primer sets, each having a primer comprised of a specific nucleic acid. This kit provides for the early detection of chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, including rarer varieties of the disease.