The Last Act of the Gene Patents (?)

The US Supreme Court has recently written the last chapter of the “Myriad trilogy”.

The issue at stake was about the patentatibility of the sequence of BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The Court unanimously ruled that DNA as such is a product of nature and, as a consequence, is not patent eligible, but the cDNA (i.e. the synthesized DNA deprived of the segment that do not code for proteins) is a patentable subject’s matter.

 

See the full decion Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.