03.06.18

Gemini version available ♊︎

Calling Genetics and Other Things “Life Sciences” Does Not Turn Nature Into Patentable Science

Posted in America, Australia, Patents at 1:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.
Reference: Association for Molecular Pathology v Myriad Genetics, Inc. | Wikipedia

Summary: The old riddle about whether naturally-occurring phenomena are patentable or not, in light of some very recent news (the past couple of days)

THE USPTO does not, in general, permit patents on genetics. The EPO has just opposed it, so it can be seen as hanging in the balance (the appeal boards will need to step in and decide).

A few days ago we wrote about life patents (e.g. patents on cancer treatments which aren't even drugs/chemicals). There are many different aspects to “life sciences” (a relatively new term if not buzzwords) and they should be considered in isolation: there’s genetics, there’s medicine, there’s treatment, there’s medical equipment and so on. They’re not the same thing.

Days ago we revisited the scam which Allergan set up with the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. IAM, not to our surprise, wrote about it under the “life sciences” banner yesterday. Adam Houldsworth wrote: [via]

Allergan sovereign immunity strategy rejected – Allergan’s effort to make patents relating to its Restasis dry-eye treatment exempt from Patent Trial and Appeal Board cancellation proceedings by transferring them to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe suffered a serious blow last week. The board ruled that the tribe’s sovereign immunity does not extend to inter partes review, and that a Restasis patent should be subject to proceedings initiated by Mylan. This followed months of controversy surrounding the deal, which was seen by some as an attempt to circumvent the patent system and by others as a means of protecting important assets from a problematic administrative proceeding. The St Regis Mohawks have stated they will appeal the PTAB decision.

These are not “assets” but monopolies and PTAB is not “a problematic administrative proceeding.” But remember that this is IAM, a PTAB basher like Watchtroll, Patently-O, Patent Docs and a few other blogs we monitor for their anti-PTAB slant.

Yesterday we saw this blog post from an anti-PTAB site called Anticipat. This company is selling itself as a ‘cure’ to PTAB’s work and it seems to miss the simple fact that if a patent is abstract, then it’s invalid. Full stop. Here’s the latest rant:

We have previously reported that PTAB judges, like Examiners, are measured by a quota-based production system. For PTAB judges, the quota is based on the number of decisions they author. It is no secret that this production system prompts some Examiners and PTAB judges at times to get creative with practices to most easily meet their quotas. Here, we look at some recent decisions that show a pattern of PTAB judges deciding a Section 101 rejection without looking to the remaining pending grounds on appeal.

Why should they? Again, like we said above, if Section 101 applies (e.g. Alice), then it’s over. We understand that many patent trolls and parasites are afraid of PTAB. It undoes the damage caused when patents were granted in a hurry and/or in error.

“Another day of watching Supreme Court opinions to see if Oil States will come out,” wrote one lawyer this week. “Going to be at least another two weeks.”

He’s wasting his time. Oil States will likely be ruled unanimously in favour of PTAB and its much-needed IPRs. The patent system is a lot better now. SCOTUS has already named “trolls” and bemoaned the effect of frivolous patent litigation. It not only gave Alice but also Mayo and Myriad. PTAB actually enforces these; so why would SCOTUS weaken PTAB now?

The situation is a tad different in Australia, probably due to pressure from the likes of CSIRO. The Australian attorney Mark Summerfield is now ranting about medical/clinical trial patents facing an uphill battle. To quote:

From a policy perspective, getting the balance right is particularly important in the case of pharmaceutical products. If it is too difficult to obtain a valid patent, there may be insufficient incentive for companies to invest billions of dollars in new drug development. On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that, one way or another, it is the wider community – either individually, or through taxes in countries where healthcare is substantially subsidised by government – that ultimately pays for that development, through the higher prices charged for patented drugs. Allowing patents to be granted too easily therefore may therefore represent a significant social cost.

Australia’s attitude towards patents on life was already mentioned here over the weekend. Patent Docs, a patent maximalists’ site, wrote about it a short while ago. It’s about Myriad again. To quote:

When the Australian High Court ruled against the patentability of isolated naturally occurring genes in the Myriad decision, a number of commentators believed that the decision would ultimately invalidate claims directed to methods involving the practical application of genes. A recent Federal Court decision, however, has confirmed that claims directed to methods involving the correlation of gene sequences to a particular trait in cattle are patent eligible subject matter in Australia.

Time will tell where the EPO stands on Myriad-type cases. At the moment it looks like there are forces tugging at both directions. Our position on that has always been the same: while we support affordable life-saving drugs and usually generics (access to medicine designed to maximise public health), we aren’t against patents on drugs; what we’re against are attempts to patent life itself, i.e. chromosomes, genome, antibodies, DNA sequences and so on.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Reddit
  • email

Decor ᶃ Gemini Space

Below is a Web proxy. We recommend getting a Gemini client/browser.

Black/white/grey bullet button This post is also available in Gemini over at this address (requires a Gemini client/browser to open).

Decor ✐ Cross-references

Black/white/grey bullet button Pages that cross-reference this one, if any exist, are listed below or will be listed below over time.

Decor ▢ Respond and Discuss

Black/white/grey bullet button If you liked this post, consider subscribing to the RSS feed or join us now at the IRC channels.

DecorWhat Else is New


  1. IBM's War on Open (Look at the Pattern of Layoffs at Red Hat)

    By abandoning OpenSource.com and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice IBM sends out a clear signal that it doesn’t understand or simply does not care about the community of Free software users; its siege against the FSF and other institutions never ended and today we look at who’s being laid off or shown the door (the work environment is intentionally being made worse)



  2. Links 06/06/2023: IceWM 3.4.0 and Liveslak 1.7.0

    Links for the day



  3. Gemini Links 06/06/2023: Apple Might Kill VR, Tea Tea Deluxe 1.2.7 and Tea Land

    Links for the day



  4. IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 05, 2023

    IRC logs for Monday, June 05, 2023



  5. Links 05/06/2023: Debian 12 Almost Ready, Hong Kong 'Cannot' Remember Tiananmen Massacre

    Links for the day



  6. Gemini Links 05/06/2023: New Ship in Cosmic Voyage, Stack Overflow Moderator Strike

    Links for the day



  7. IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 04, 2023

    IRC logs for Sunday, June 04, 2023



  8. Links 04/06/2023: Unifont 15.0.05 and PCLinuxOS Stuff

    Links for the day



  9. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Wayland and the Old Computer Challenge

    Links for the day



  10. StatCounter: GNU/Linux (Including ChromeOS) Grows to 8% Market Share Worldwide

    This month’s numbers from StatCounter are good for GNU/Linux (including ChromeOS, which technically has both GNU and Linux); the firm assesses logs from 3 million sites and shows Windows down to 66% in desktops/laptops (a decade ago it was above 90%) with modest growth for GNU/Linux, which is at an all-time high, even if one does not count ChromeOS that isn’t freedom- or privacy-respecting



  11. Journalism Cannot and Quite Likely Won't Survive on the World Wide Web

    We’re reaching the point where the overwhelming majority of new pages on the Web (the World Wide Web) are basically junk, sometimes crafted not by humans; how to cope with this rapid deterioration is still an unknown — an enigma that demands hard answers or technical workarounds



  12. Do Not Assume Pensions Are Safe, Especially When Managed by Mr. EPOTIF Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos

    With the "hoax" that is the financial assessment by António Campinos (who is deliriously celebrating the inauguration of illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo courts) we urge EPO workers to check carefully the integrity of their pensions, seeing that pension promises have been broken for years already



  13. Links 04/06/2023: Why Flatpak and Wealth of Devices With GNU/Linux

    Links for the day



  14. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Rosy Crow 1.1.3 and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

    Links for the day



  15. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 03, 2023

    IRC logs for Saturday, June 03, 2023



  16. Links 04/06/2023: Azure Outage Again (So Many!) and Tiananmen Massacre Censored

    Links for the day



  17. Links 03/06/2023: Qubes OS 4.2.0 RC1 and elementaryOS Updates for May

    Links for the day



  18. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Hidden Communities and Exam Prep is Not Education

    Links for the day



  19. Links 03/06/2023: IBM Betraying LibreOffice Some More (After Laying off LibreOffice Developers)

    Links for the day



  20. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Bubble Woes and Zond Updates

    Links for the day



  21. Links 03/06/2023: Apache NetBeans 18 and ArcaOS 5.0.8

    Links for the day



  22. IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 02, 2023

    IRC logs for Friday, June 02, 2023



  23. The Developing World Abandons Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux at All-Time Highs on Desktops/Laptops

    Microsoft, with 80 billion dollars in longterm debt and endless layoffs, is losing the monopolies; the media doesn’t mention this, but some publicly-accessible data helps demonstrate that



  24. Links 02/06/2023: Elive ‘Retrowave’ Stable and Microsoft's Half a Billion Dollar Fine for LinkeIn Surveillance in Europe

    Links for the day



  25. Linux Foundation 'Research' Has a New Report and Of Course It Uses Only Proprietary Software

    The Linux Foundation has a new report, promoted by Clickfraud Spamnil and others; of course they’re rejecting Free software, they’re just riding the “Linux” brand and speak of “Open Source” (which they reject themselves)



  26. Links 02/06/2023: Arti 1.1.5 and SQL:2023

    Links for the day



  27. Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Vimwiki Revisited, SGGS Revisited

    Links for the day



  28. Geminispace/GemText/Gemini Protocol Turn 4 on June 20th

    Gemini is turning 4 this month (on the 20th, according to the founder) and I thought I’d do a spontaneous video about how I use Gemini, why it's so good, and why it’s still growing (Stéphane Bortzmeyer fixed the broken cron job — or equivalent of it — a day or two after I had mentioned the issue)



  29. HMRC Does Not Care About Tax Fraud Committed by UK Government Contractor, Sirius 'Open Source'

    The tax crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ were reported to HMRC two weeks ago; HMRC did not bother getting back to the reporters (victims of the crime) and it’s worth noting that the reporters worked on UK government systems for many years, so maybe there’s a hidden incentive to bury this under the rug



  30. Our IRC at 15th Anniversary

    So our IRC community turns 15 today (sort of) and I’ve decided to do a video reflecting on the fact that some of the same people are still there after 15 years


RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channel: Come and chat with us in real time

Recent Posts