The Last Chapter of the Gene Patents Saga (?)
The US Supreme Court has recently written the final chapter of the so-called “Myriad trilogy”. The issue at stake was the patentatibility of the sequence of BRCA-1 and BRCA-2, two human caretaker genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The Court unanimously ruled that DNA as such is a product of nature and, as a consequence, it is not patent eligible, while 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 decision Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.