Pending Litigation
Patent Update: Looking Beyond Section 101 and the Continued Murkiness of Method Patents
As the biotechnology community awaits the Federal Circuit’s decision in the Myriad Genetics patent litigation, attention has focused on the fundamental issue in that case: whether genes and methods for interpreting mutations are patentable subject matter under section 101 of the Patent Act—that is, whether they are the kinds of things that can be patented assuming that all of the other requirements of the Patent Act (pdf) are satisfied.
However, we have argued in several articles (see, e.g., here, here and here) that the real action is more likely to involve all of those “other requirements” as courts explore other ways to limit the patentability of scientific and technology progress without altering the threshold test of patentability under section 101.
A recent Federal Circuit case (Billups-Rothenberg, Inc. v. Associated Regional and University Pathologists, Inc.) decided under the written description requirement of section 112 illustrates this point yet again.
Billups v. ARUP Background. The Billups case involves a disorder called Type I hereditary hemochromatosis, which is characterized by excessive absorption of iron. The critical gene in the absorption process is called HFE, or “High Fe.” In 1994, Billups filed the application that led to a patent on methods for testing for hemochromatosis (U.S. patent number 5,674,681; “’681”). The court’s opinion reproduces this claim as “representative”:
Fabry Patients Ask for Rehearing of NIH March-in Petition
Back in December, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) refused to exercise the government’s “march-in” rights under the Bayh-Dole Act with respect to the patent-protected drug Fabrazyme® (agalsidase beta). A group of Fabry disease patients had petitioned NIH to grant licenses to other prospective producers of the enzyme replacement therapy because manufacturing problems at Genzyme, the exclusive licensee of patents held by Mount Sinai School of Medicine, had created severe supply problems.
When NIH refused to act, a larger group filed a class action lawsuit (pdf) in Pennsylvania federal court against Genzyme and Mt. Sinai for damages allegedly caused by their inability to get prescribed dosages of Fabrazyme®. As we reported last month, the suit raises novel legal theories and faces an uncertain future. (Earlier this month Genzyme filed a motion to dismiss (pdf) the lawsuit.)
What We Learned From The Myriad Oral Argument
Yesterday brought the long-anticipated oral argument in the Myriad gene patent litigation. After much speculation, the final panel consisted of Judges Lourie, Bryson and Moore. Following the Myriad argument, Judge Lourie was replaced on the panel for the remainder of the day’s cases by Judge O’Malley, lending support to speculation that Judge O’Malley recused herself from the Myriad argument because her lawyer-spouse filed an amicus brief in the case.
What We Learned from the Myriad Oral Argument. For all of the attention focused on the Myriad oral argument, most spectators have only one very practical question: did Monday’s argument provided any meaningful clues with respect to how the Federal Circuit might rule on appeal of the lower court’s startling ruling?
In a word: no. In a few more: we learned nothing from the Myriad argument that leaves us better able to predict how the Federal Circuit will rule in this case.
A Spectator’s Guide to the Myriad Oral Argument
On Monday at 10 a.m., the lawyers for both sides will argue the Myriad case (Association for Molecular Pathology v. USPTO) before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington. Here are a few things about oral argument in general, and this case in particular, that interested observers may want to keep in mind.
Who’s on the Panel? Federal cases on appeal are almost always heard initially by a panel of three randomly selected judges. (In rare cases all the judges of a circuit will rehear the case together, or en banc—no way to predict if that will eventually happen here.) The Federal Circuit will announce the panel for this case on Monday morning on its website. As of now, all we know is that Myriad—and only Myriad—will be heard by “Panel B+.” The + means that the makeup of that panel will be different from that of Panel B, which will hear the three other cases also scheduled for this 10 a.m. session (a panel customarily hears four arguments in a session). The + designation sometimes means that one member of the regular panel (here, B) has recused (disqualified) him or herself from the case because of some conflict, necessitating a replacement.
Frustrated by NIH Inaction, Fabry Patients Attempt End Run Around Bayh-Dole
Back on January 18, 2010, we reported on the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) refusal to exercise the government’s “march-in” rights under the Bayh-Dole Act with respect to the patent-protected drug Fabrazyme (agalsidase beta). The drug is an enzyme replacement produced from a recombinant mammalian cell line (i.e., a biologic) and is used to treat the symptoms of Fabry disease, a rare genetic condition that impairs the victim’s ability to metabolize fat and can lead to kidney failure and heart disease. Fabrazyme was developed at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, which obtained two patents related to its manufacture and granted Genzyme an exclusive manufacturing license. After contamination at Genzyme’s facility led to a severe shortage and Fabrazyme rationing, a lawyer for three patients petitioned the NIH to march in and grant licenses to other manufacturers. As it has in all other cases, NIH denied the request.
Now, those same patients, joined by eight others, have sued Genzyme and Mt. Sinai (which the complaint erroneously describes as part of the public City University of New York, when in fact it is affiliated with the private New York University) over the shortage. The complaint (pdf) was filed on March 9, 2011 in the federal district court in Pittsburgh. The plaintiffs are represented by C. Allen Black, the same Pennsylvania patent lawyer who filed the NIH march-in petition.
How Will Myriad Respond to the Next Generation of BRCA Testing?
Robert Cook-Deegan contributed to this commentary. Dr. Cook-Deegan is Director of the Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy at Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy’s and is currently on leave at the Fondation Brocher in Hermance, Switzerland.
The past few months have brought a number of significant research and commercial developments in the BRCA diagnostic testing market, particularly in Europe. These developments have been met by enigmatic comments from the management of Myriad Genetics, the sole provider of commercial BRCA diagnostic testing in the United States and a defendant in ongoing and closely-scrutinized gene patent litigation. What can these recent developments tell us about Myriad’s future plans in both Europe and the U.S.?
The Next Generation of BRCA Testing. Myriad’s current BRCA diagnostic test, BRACAnalysis (pdf), uses a combination of two traditional technologies—Sanger sequencing and PCR—to identify mutations associated with a significant risk of breast cancer and/or ovarian cancer in the BRCA1 and BRAC2 genes. Although Myriad has dabbled with next-generation sequencing technologies, Myriad has yet to announce any concrete plans to apply any of the increasingly numerous and powerful next-generation sequencing technologies to its BRACAnalysis testing.
Others, however, are moving rapidly in exactly this direction.
More News on DNA in Forensics
We recently noted that DNA profiling has greater public approval in the UK than in America. The UK presently operates the largest DNA database in the world with over 5 million profiles. Nevertheless, that country has just taken a giant step in the opposite direction. New civil liberties legislation, dubbed “the freedom bill,” will require authorities to remove hundreds of thousands of unconvicted people from the database, following a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that “the blanket retention of DNA from people arrested but never convicted of any offence [i]s unlawful.” There are 1.1 million people without convictions presently profiled in the database; however, some of these profiles will not be removed as a result of an exception for “unconvicted terror suspects who have been released.”
Here in the U.S., the Supreme Court will consider the post-conviction DNA testing landscape in the Texas case of Henry Skinner. Thousands of convicts are requesting new DNA testing in light of the increasing number of exonerations based on DNA evidence. Skinner was convicted 15 years ago of murdering his girlfriend and her two developmentally disabled adult sons. At the recommendation of his attorneys, he declined DNA testing for his trial. Texas courts said he doesn’t currently qualify under a state law that grants DNA testing to some convicts, and federal courts refused to overrule Texas. The last time the Supreme Court considered this issue, in 2009, a divided court decided to let Congress and the state legislatures make the rules. Therefore, rules vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to how requests for post-conviction DNA testing are handled. Perhaps this time the Supreme Court will decide to lay down some firmer ground rules.
Genetic Bill of Rights Proposed in Massachusetts
On January 21, 2011, the Massachusetts Genetic Bill of Rights (MA GBR) (pdf) was introduced before the Massachusetts state legislature. At its core, the proposed legislation establishes property and privacy rights for genetic information and genetic material, while providing protections designed to shield individuals from genetic profiling and other misuses of genetic information.
Taken as a whole, the legislation, if enacted, would confer upon Massachusetts residents a significantly expanded set of genetic rights than exist under current federal law. Below we examine several of the bill’s most noteworthy proposals.
The MA GBR addresses perceived gaps and limitations in the coverage provided by major federal statutes, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA), and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by seeking to place genetic information on a par with medical records.
The MA GBR’s provisions set basic limitations on the use, including the commercial use, of personal genetic information that would go above and beyond the user agreements and privacy policies employed by some commercial services. For example, the MA GBR prohibits the use of genetic information for marketing or determining credit worthiness. With the proliferation of genetic information, particularly in consumer or commercial contexts, such basic limitations would help address concerns about the lack of mandatory restrictions regarding the sale, transfer or other use of personal genetic data.
The Personal Property Theory of Personal Genomes. But the MA GBR goes much further than mere consumer protection reforms. Section 1 of the proposed legislation explicitly declares genetic information to be “the exclusive property of the individual from whom the information is obtained.” (emphasis added)
Personalized Medicine Regulation Needs More Than Band-Aids
[Editor's Note: This post originally appeared as a guest column at Xconomy.]
Last week, New York State assemblyman J. Gary Pretlow introduced the descriptively named “act to amend the insurance law, in relation to requiring coverage for genetic testing in accident and health insurance polices.”
While not accompanied by a press release, or widely covered by media outlets, the bill merits close attention. While the substance of the bill is striking, its greater import lies in what it reveals about the United States’ current framework for personalized medicine regulation and in what the bill portends for the future of personalized medicine innovation and investment in this country.
Government Refuses to March-In Under Bayh-Dole—Again
The Bayh-Dole Act was in the news at the end of 2010. Three patients suffering from Fabry disease, a rare genetic condition that impairs the victim’s ability to metabolize fat and can lead to kidney failure and heart disease, petitioned the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to exercise the government’s “march-in” rights under Bayh-Dole (pdf) and compel the holder of the patent on the only FDA-approved Fabry treatment to grant licenses to other manufacturers. Just as it has in response to every previous march-in petition, the NIH refused the march-in request (pdf).
Bayh-Dole, From the Beginning. Enacted in 1980, Bayh-Dole was intended to promote the commercialization of government-funded research by allowing universities and other non-profits that receive federal grants—rather than the government itself—to own any resulting patents. This then-radical change in the law gave rise to the practice of technology transfer, whereby universities conduct sponsored research, patent the results, and then license the use of the patented inventions to spin-offs (which often involve the faculty inventors as principals) and other private companies.
