Three years ago, when I started this Blog (or is it “Blawg”?), the hot topics were In re Kubin and the summary affirmance of Classen by the Fed. Cir. Today, along with the looming AIA regulations, Mayo v. Prometheus and Caraco are awaiting decision by the Supreme Court, and St-Gobain Ceramics v. Siemens and AMP v. Myriad are awaiting decisions on their petitions for cert. The old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!” is “new again”, even if “The Art of War” is not on the Times bestseller list (but “American Sniper” is).
Well, the IP world around us has been nothing if not interesting. It is foolish to try to predict what will hold our (and the courts’ ) interest over the next year, much less three years. However, a trend that is easy to spot is the interest exhibited by the current Supreme Court in IP cases. When I did my list of the top ten IP stories of 2011, six of them involved the Supreme Court.
Another one is the rise of IP and bioethics issues related to “personal genomics”, “genome-scale testing” or “companion diagnostics” (however you wish to term it). Today, the journal, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics announced that it will publish an issue devoted to personal stories from individuals who have received results from genome-scale testing – such as from a SNP profile (bet you haven’t heard that term in a while). On the flight home from AUTM, I read a story about one such individual in the LA Times – a professor who had his entire genome sequenced and posted it so that any group could venture a diagnosis or other observation. One group spotted a marker for type II diabetes, which the prof obligingly developed after recovering from a viral infection.
