Since this is an amplification of my last post on the Sequenom petition for cert. in Sequenom v. Ariosa, please go back at read my first post on the petition. I have been arguing for some years that the patent world will never be at rest where diagnostic claims are concerned until the patent eligibility of a simple “If A, then B” claim is addressed by the Fed. Cir. and/or the Supreme Court.
This is the type of claim criticized by Justices Breyer, Souter and Stevens in the “Metabolite Labs dissent” of 2006, when the Court declined to decide the patent-eligibility of a method of detecting a deficiency of cobalamin or folate by assaying a body fluid for an elevated level of homocysteine and correlating the elevated level with a cobalamin or homocysteine deficiency.” Justice Breyer just called the claim a law of nature with a mental step.
Fast forward to 2012 and the Mayo decision (132 S.Ct. 1289), and the Supreme Court invalidated an awkwardly drafted claim that I will re-write here as a method of medical treatment claim:
Sequenom, the loser in “Ariosa,” has filed a petition seeking Supreme Court review of the Fed. Cir.’s invalidation of the claims of US Pat. No. 6,258,540 as an attempt to claim a natural product, cffDNA. While there is no dispute among the commentators that this decision was flat-out wrong, the majority of the panel seemed to agree that it was compelled by the “Mayo/Alice Rule” (after they spotted the natural product, cffDNA, and ignored the other claim steps as conventional). (A copy of the Petition can be found at the end of this post.)
h 10-11, 2016 the 
