biotech – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Diagnostic Patents Suffer Another Setback In US As Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Sequenom Appeal

from the outbreak-of-good-sense dept

In recent years, there have been a couple of really important US Supreme Court decisions in the biotech field. One is the 2013 judgment striking down gene patents. The other is a ruling from 2012 that rejected the patenting of basic medical diagnostics, in a case involving Mayo Collaborative Services and Prometheus Labs. The resultant loss for biotech companies in terms of devalued patent portfolios, and their reduced ability to control the market using intellectual monopolies, has been so serious that it is no surprise that there are periodic attempts to get these decisions mitigated through subsequent court rulings.

For this reason, the industry has been watching with great interest a case involving Sequenom, and its patent on a non-invasive pre-natal diagnosis test using the fact that fetal DNA is present in the blood plasma of expectant mothers. A lower court invalidated that patent on the basis of the Mayo decision, and Sequenom appealed to the Supreme Court to review the ruling. But a statement from the company has now dashed the biotech industry’s hopes:

> The Supreme Court of the United States denied [Sequenom’s] petition to review decisions by lower Federal courts that the claims of Sequenom’s U.S. Patent No. 6,258,540 (“‘540 Patent”) are not patent eligible under the patent eligibility criteria established by the Supreme Court’s Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories decision. In the petition, Sequenom urged the Court to hear the case because the Court is uniquely suited to reconcile and interpret the patent eligibility criteria established in its Mayo decision. Sequenom will pursue no further appeal opportunities for review of the ‘540 Patent.

Although the industry will doubtless whine about how there is no incentive to produce new diagnostic tests, there’s no evidence that research and development in this area has ground to a halt in the US since the Supreme Court ruling on Mayo. All that has happened is that obvious applications of natural biological phenomena have been removed from patentability. Given the inherent reasonableness of that, we can probably hope that further challenges to Mayo will also fail.

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Filed Under: biotech, gene patents, patents
Companies: sequenom

DailyDirt: Fountains Of Youth…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Lab mice aren’t really a great model model for studying human health, but we use them anyway. And every so often, researchers stumble on drugs that seem to make lab mice live longer. Unfortunately, no one has found a reliable treatment for significantly extending a human lifespan just yet — but if you want to raise old mice, there are plenty of things that’ll work. Check out a few of these potential fountains of youth for mice.

The first human clinical trials using nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) to slow the aging process should begin soon — on a small sample of 10 healthy people. NMN works remarkably well in mice, but no one knows yet how well it will work in people. If it’s safe enough, though, it’s a good bet that people will be adding this stuff to vitamins ASAP.
A hormone, osteocalcin, injected in old mice appears to allow the rodents to run just as far as much younger mice. Old mice that weren’t given this hormone ran about half as far, so researchers are planning to try this in people next.
If rapamycin works to delay the onset of certain diseases in mice, maybe it’ll work… on our pet dogs? And if Fido lives a bit longer and healthier, maybe we’ll try it ourselves, too. (Eating our own dogfood..?)
How about chemical precursors to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) to try to keep yourself young? You can buy this stuff right now as a supplement, if you’d like to participate in your own highly unscientific study….