Sequenom petitions SCOTUS over Ariosa row

Sequenom has urged the US Supreme Court to hear its patent dispute with Ariosa Diagnostics.

In a writ of certiorari filed yesterday, March 21, Sequenom said a previous decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit extended the Mayo v Prometheus ruling too far and that meritorious inventions should be accepted.

The court has been asked to consider whether a novel method is patent-eligible when a researcher has achieved three things.

They are that the researcher is first to discover a natural phenomenon, that unique knowledge has motivated him or her to apply a new combination of known techniques to that discovery, and a previously impossible result is discovered without pre-empting other uses of the discovery.

The dispute concerns Ariosa’s Harmony Test, a non-invasive tool for pre-natal diagnosis of foetal qualities, which Sequenom claimed infringed its US patent number 6,258,540, obtained in 2001.

The ‘540 patent is directed to a method of detecting paternally inherited cell-free fetal DNA in maternal plasma in pregnant women.

In 2012, Ariosa sought a declaratory judgment of non-infringement from the US District Court for the District of Northern California. Sequenom counterclaimed and requested a preliminary injunction. The district court ruled that the ‘540 patent was invalid.

A three-judge panel at the federal circuit affirmed the invalidity of the patent in June, citing the 2012 Mayo decision by the US Supreme Court. It said the patent covered a natural phenomenon and therefore the method could not be patented.

In December last year, the federal circuit rejected Sequenom’s request for a re-hearing of the dispute en banc,despite Sequenom’s protestation that the federal circuit’s “misinterpretation” of Mayo represented an “existential threat to patent protection” in the biotechnology field.