Today, the Fed. Cir. affirmed the district court’s holding that the method for detecting paternally inherited nucleic acid of fetal origin in a sample of the mother’s blood was a patent-ineligible natural phenomenon. Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc. v Sequenom, Inc., Appeal No. 2014-1139, 2014-1144. (Fed. Cir. June 12, 2015). (A copy is available at the end of this post.) Although commentators have already begun to lament that this decision puts a stake in the heart of claims to diagnostic methods (what I call “If A, then B” claims), I am going to do my best to resist this conclusion.
Of the claims asserted in the case, only one (claim 21) recites “providing a diagnosis based on the presence and/or quantity and/or sequence of the foetal nucleic acid,” and no dependent claim identified what specific diagnosis (e.g., increased likelihood of Down’s syndrome) was provided (or to whom it was provided). Claim 1 was broadly directed to a method for detecting a paternally inherited nucleic acid of fetal original performed on a maternal serum or plasma sample from a pregnant female by amplifying a paternally inherited nucleic acid and detecting its presence in the sample.
