Posts Tagged: "Meredith Addy"

On November 1, Meredith Addy of AddyHart P.C. and I submitted an Amici Curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Freenome Holdings and New Cures for Cancers in support of the Petition for Certiorari in Athena Diagnostics v. Mayo Collaborative Services. If the Supreme Court does not take this case, it is unlikely to reconsider its decisions on Section 101 of the U.S. patent law. This may be our last gasp judicial effort. The Supreme Court takes cases raising inconsistencies in the law or a circuit split. We knew parties/amici would focus on the Federal Circuit’s “internal circuit split,” so we took a different approach and urged the Court to resolve five critical inconsistencies in the law, summarized below.

The presently pending petition for en banc review in Athena Diagnostics, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Servs., LLC has been addressed by Sherry Knowles and Meredith Addy and is supported by a number of amicus briefs. The patent in issue has been described by the present author as a paradigm of patent eligibility, supporting the argument that en banc review is merited. Mayo has now filed its response brief, submitted on May 7, and argues that the panel’s decision invalidating the asserted claims as ineligible properly applied the two-step Alice framework in light of precedent, that the full Court need not re-examine it, and accordingly, that Appellants’ petition should be denied.

April 22 was the deadline for filing amicus briefs with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Athena Diagnostics’ petition for an en banc rehearing by the court. The petition comes after a 2-1 panel decision in early February affirmed a district court’s ruling that patent claims covering methods of diagnosing myasthenia gravis (MG), an autoimmune disorder that causes weakness in skeletal muscles, were directed toward laws of nature and were thus unpatentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. In an invitation to file briefs with the Federal Circuit in this case, Knowles IP Strategies Founder Sherry Knowles and AddyHart Partner Meredith Addy discussed the need for amici to hold the Federal Circuit accountable regarding its duty to apply a strict statutory construction of the literal language of Section 101 to ensure that patent eligibility cases are decided in a way that is consistent with Constitutional statutes. Knowles and Addy filed a brief on behalf of Freenome Holdings and Achillon Pharmaceuticals (discussed below). Theirs and other briefs that have now been filed raise concerns about the inability to patent life-saving diagnostic methods that are found ineligible under Section 101 using the Alice/Mayo framework simply because the invention or discovery involves monitoring natural processes.

Athena Diagnostics filed a petition for en banc rehearing of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s decision in Athena Diagnostics v. Mayo on April 8, 2019. Amicus briefs are due April 22, 2019. The Athena decision continues to apply U.S. Supreme Court-created common law to the analysis of 35 U.S.C. §101. In its brief requesting rehearing, Athena argues that the decision is “precisely the evisceration of patent law against which the U.S. Supreme Court has long warned” and that the claims at issue were patent eligible, as they are “novel, man-made substances”, “do not preempt natural laws” and “serve a new and useful purpose of diagnosing serious diseases”. Knowles IP Strategies LLC (Sherry M. Knowles) and AddyHart (Meredith Addy) intend to file an amicus brief in support of neither party requesting that the Federal Circuit carry out its constitutional duty to apply strict statutory construction of the literal words of 35 U.S.C. §101 to decide the case (See, Unconstitutional Application of 35 U.S.C. § 101 by the U.S. Supreme Court; 18 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 144 (2018)).