US personalized-medicine industry takes hit from Supreme Court
From the article:
Rejections for US patents related to personalized medicine have spiked after recent Supreme Court decisions tightened the rules for such claims, an analysis of more than 39,000 patent applications reveals.
The data, presented on 11 August at the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference in Stanford, California, address patent applications in eight categories that commonly include personalized-medicine patents. They show that following a key Supreme Court decision in 2012, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was nearly four times more likely to deem subjects of such applications unpatentable — and applicants were less than half as likely to overcome those rejections.
“The change in office actions was absolutely striking,” says Nicholson Price, who studies intellectual property at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. “The data are very clear that the patent office has changed its behaviour.” [...]