Personalized medicine relies on diagnostic technologies to accurately evaluate a patient’s clinical or genetic signature to guide treatment decisions. Protecting innovation by patenting the diagnostic methods and tools that inform clinical intervention and treatment has been the traditional means to protect investment in these important technologies. Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have challenged inventors’ ability to patent diagnostic innovations, notably the Supreme Court’s Prometheus, Myriad, and Alice decisions, by removing from the scope of patentable subject matter discoveries that broadly tie a medical marker, e.g., a biomarker or drug metabolite, to a therapeutic intervention (Prometheus), isolated products of nature such as mutated genes that are detected as individual biomarkers (Myriad) and abstract ideas that may integrate complex clinical information (Alice). A panel of experts speaking at Foley & Lardner’s 11th Annual IP Conference…
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