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Myriad, Finally: Supreme Court Surprises by not Surprising
After what seemed like an eternity, the epic saga known as AMP v. Myriad Genetics has finally come to a close. On June 13, 2013, the Supreme Court ruled (1) that isolated genomic DNA (gDNA) is not patent-eligible under section 101 of the Patent Act, but (2) cDNA is. For once, what the Justices said at oral argument gave accurate clues to what they really thought, and the result was what almost every observer (including this one) had predicted.
EEOC Files and Settles Its First GINA-based Employment Discrimination Lawsuit on May 7, 2013
Jennifer K. Wagner, J.D., Ph.D., is a solo-practicing attorney in State College, PA and a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a statement that it had filed a lawsuit against Fabricut, Inc. on May 7, 2013 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, making it the first lawsuit brought by the agency to enforce genetic nondiscrimination rights afforded by Title II of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA). A consent decree was filed concurrently, thereby settling the lawsuit on the same day.
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Some Thoughts on Myriad After the Supreme Court Argument
On April 15, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. This was another significant step—probably the penultimate one—in the long-running Myriad drama. It began with a group of plaintiffs (including researchers, doctors, and breast cancer patients) joining an American Civil Liberties Union-organized lawsuit to invalidate Myriad’s patents on two breast cancer susceptibility genes (BRCA1 and 2) as well as patents on methods of interpreting genetic test results and testing anti-cancer drug efficacy. In a shocking decision, the federal district court in New York threw out all of Myriad’s patents. The Federal Circuit then reversed the district court’s rulings on the gene patents, with the three-judge panel holding unanimously that cDNA is patentable subject matter and holding 2-1 that isolated genomic DNA is patentable as well. The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling that Myriad’s methods of interpreting mutations are not patentable, but reversed it in reinstating Myriad’s claims to methods of testing drug efficacy.
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The FDA, Social Media & Consumer Genomics: A Lot Not to “Like”
Last week, the FDA published on its website a warning letter to AMARC Enterprises, Inc., a marketer of a dietary supplement known as Poly-MVA. (Here is the company’s description of the supplement.) While the letter is not addressed to a high-profile company or product, given that the FDA’s action will likely have broader significance beyond just AMARC and its Poly-MVA supplement, all currently or potentially FDA-regulated entities, including consumer genomics companies, should take note.
The AMARC letter, issued by a regional compliance office and dating to this past December, is unremarkable in most respects. The majority of the letter focuses on website copy, printed information packets, customer testimonials and other materials that appear, at least to the FDA, to represent claims made by AMARC that the Poly-MVA supplement is “intended for use in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease,” thus making it a drug subject to FDA regulatory approval.
Supreme Court to Rule on Patentability of Human Genes
Robert Cook-Deegan contributed to this commentary. Dr. Cook-Deegan is a research professor in the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.
The Supreme Court today granted a writ of certiorari (meaning they agreed to hear the appeal) in Assoc. for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., et al., the famous case centered on patents covering two human genes: BRCA1 and BRCA2.
Of note is that the Court limited its grant of the appeal to the first of the three questions posed by the petitioners/plaintiffs: “Are human genes patentable?”
DNA DTC: The Return of Direct to Consumer Whole Genome Sequencing
This morning, Gene By Gene, Ltd. – better known as the parent company of the popular genetic genealogy provider Family Tree DNA – formally announced a corporate reorganization that includes the debut of a new division, DNA DTC. (Apparently the news was also announced earlier this month at the Family Tree DNA Conference, although the company waited until today to launch press releases.)
The announcement from Gene By Gene is newsworthy for several reasons, including:
1. The Return of True DTC Whole Genome and Whole Exome Sequencing. According to DNA DTC, the company offers a range of products “utilizing next generation sequencing including the entire exome (at 80x coverage) and the whole genome.” The company’s website, while fairly spartan, appears to bear this out. Whole exomes ($695 at 80x coverage) and genomes ($5,495 at 30x coverage) are both listed as available products.
Now, Gene By Gene is not, as its Wikipedia page claims (as of this writing), “the first commercial company to offer whole genome sequencing tests.” Knome earned that honor more than four years ago, when it started selling whole genome sequences for $350,000; an astounding price, either low (given the cost of the first human genome was $3 billion) or high (given that, well, it was $350,000) depending on your perspective. Gene By Gene probably does represent, however, the only commercial company currently offering a whole genome sequence in a truly direct-to-consumer (DTC) manner.
Myriad Updates: Clinical Data as Trade Secrets and a Pending Certiorari Decision
Earlier this month, my colleagues John Conley, Robert Cook-Deegan, James Evans and I published a policy article in the European Journal of Human Genetics (EJHG) entitled “The next controversy in genetic testing: clinical data as trade secrets.”
The EJHG article is open access so you can read the entire article at the EJHG website, but here is the abstract:
Applying Mayo to Myriad: Latest Decision Brings No New News (Plus: Why the Final Myriad Decision Might Not Matter for Personalized Medicine)
The latest chapter in the Myriad gene patent litigation was written yesterday, with the Federal Circuit issuing its much anticipated opinion (pdf) after rehearing the case following the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision earlier this year in Prometheus v. Mayo.
Or perhaps we should say that the latest chapter was “rewritten” as, in a move that surprised approximately nobody, and as we predicted earlier this spring, the Federal Circuit reached precisely the same result in its opinion today as it did last July when it issued its first substantive ruling in the Myriad litigation. Below, we examine how the Federal Circuit applied Mayo to Myriad, what the next step in the Myriad litigation is likely to be (spoiler alert: it’s another appeal) and why we think the final opinion in this case, whenever it arrives and whatever it says, might not matter all that much.
Applying Mayo to Myriad. As mentioned, the only major change since the last time the Federal Circuit ruled in Myriad, and the reason for the re-hearing, was the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this spring in Mayo.
However, Mayo was about method patents and the boundary between a patent-eligible method and a law of nature. It was not about product patents or the product of nature doctrine. Since the Federal Circuit had already invalidated all but one of Myriad’s method patents even before the Supreme Court tightened the criteria for method patents in Mayo, it was hard to see much of substance changing the second time around.
23andMe Seeks FDA Clearance (Podcast)
Last week, personal genetics company 23andMe announced that it had formally delivered the first round of documentation to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in an attempt to receive 510(k) clearance for its consumer product.
23andMe declared itself “first in the [ direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing] industry to announce it is working towards FDA clearance.” That first followed another first for the company earlier in the summer: 23andMe’s first patent, which covers a method of predicting susceptibility to Parkinson’s Disease.
I sat down last week with The Burrill Report to discuss 23andMe’s recent activities and their implications for the future of DTC genetic testing and personalized medicine. You can listen to the complete podcast here.
The Burden of Enforcing GINA: EEOC v. Nestle Illustrates One Challenge in Pursuing Genetic Discrimination Claims
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) is a federal law making it illegal for insurers and employers to acquire and to use genetic information in certain contexts. Specifically, Title II of GINA prohibits employers with more than 15 employees, employment agencies, labor organizations, and joint labor-management training and apprenticeship program committees from using genetic information when making employment decisions (e.g. hiring, firing, promotions, placement, compensation, privileges, seniority, etc).
The employment discrimination provisions took effect on November 21, 2009, with an air of uncertainty, as the Final Rules implementing Title II of GINA were not issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) until a year later (See 75 Fed Reg 68912-68939 [pdf], issued November 9, 2010) and did not take effect until January 10, 2011. (See previous GLR coverage of GINA Title II here and of GINA generally here).
