Richard Epstein on the issue of patent scope:

This issue of patent scope is now before the Supreme Court in the important case of Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings v. Metabolite Laboratories, Inc. Metabolite had a patent for a particularl process for detecting two vitamin-B deficiencies, for cobalimin or folate, which depended on "correlating an elevated level of homcysteine in said body fluid with a deficiency in cobalmin [sic] or folate." No one doubted that its particular diagnostic tst was patentable. But the Supreme Court has taken the case to ask whether a patent extends to a discovery of the "correlation" without more. If the patent is valid, then no rival company can market any other diagnostic test that exploits this relationship without a license from Metabolite. . .

[T]he case looks dangerously like patenting some law of nature so as to exclude from the markt all competitors with superior tests. . . The proper result is to reject this and all other correlation claims.

More on patent scope and biotech:

The current strong protection of isolated and purified substances has lead to immense investment, which led between 1980 and 2001 to some 8,000 gene patents. It is doubtful this outpouring of research would have taken place without the exclusive rights offered by the patent system. Thus in March 2000, when President Bill Clinton doubted out loud the validity of genomic patents, 10 key firms lost $30 billion in market capitalization overnight. If the current law were defective, then the stock of other firms should have soared because of the new opportunities open to them. But that did not happen.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:33 AM | Academia, Biotech, Liberty and IP, Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation, Patents, Supreme Court

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