gene patents

Recent Articles

Like air and water, DNA should not be patentable

BY ANDRÉ PICARD
THE GLOBE AND MAIL

‘Gene patents no longer need to stand in the way of diagnosing life-threatening disease.”
That’s how Alex Munter, president and chief executive officer of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, summed up the impact of an out-of-court settlement in the lawsuit CHEO launched against Transgenomic Inc. in 2014. Transgenomic, a biotechnology company based in Omaha, Neb., owns five gene patents related to the potentially deadly heart condition Long QT syndrome. What that meant, practically, was that if CHEO (or any other hospital) wanted to test patients for Long QT, they had to send the blood sample to Transgenomic and pay $4,800 – even though the hospital had the ability to do the same tests for about $1,500. Further, if a genetic defect that points to Long QT was discovered incidentally – for example, when the lab did a panel on larger parts of the genome – that information could not be communicated to the patient, again because of the patent. Dubious patents were preventing the timely diagnosis and treatment of sick children and “we found that morally reprehensible,” said Gail Graham, CHEO’s chief of genetics. Continue Reading →

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Genes can’t be patented, rules Australia’s High Court

BY MICHAEL SLEZAK
NEWSCIENTIST

Your genes are no longer patentable in Australia. The country’s highest court found unanimously that two previous Australian judgments allowing patents of genes were wrong, and they do not constitute a patentable invention. The judges unanimously agreed on the outcome, but had different reasons. The majority of judges ruled that the key part of a gene is not its physical structure, but rather the information stored in it, which is not an invention. They wrote: “[Its] substance is information embodied in arrangements of nucleotides. Continue Reading →

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End of the road for Myriad gene patent fight

BY KELLY SERVICK
SCIENCE

The molecular diagnostics company Myriad Genetics has put an end to a long battle to defend controversial patents on genetic tests for cancer risk. Several of the companies Myriad was suing for patent infringement announced settlements this week, and The New York Times reports that the company is in discussions to settle the remaining suits. In a high-profile 2013 decision, the Supreme Court invalidated many of Myriad’s key patents by declaring human genes to be unpatentable products of nature. But as other companies began to develop and market competing genetic tests, Myriad sued several of them, claiming that certain patents had not been invalidated by the decision. Myriad’s targets included the firms LabCorp, Ambry Genetics, and Quest Diagnostics. Continue Reading →

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