Myriad woes for US innovators

In April 2013 the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v Myriad Genetics, which concerned the validity of a series of patents directed to the breast cancer susceptibility genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. The case required the court to assess whether a naturally occurring ‘segment’ of DNA could be patent-eligible by virtue of its isolation from the rest of the human genome.