Patent Eligibility

Individual Paper:

In the field of Biotechnology, there are many inventions carried out to cure the diseases. To cure a patient with a particular type of disease, it is essential that the external drugs determined as a solution for the disease have to be combined with the human body to provide the desired effect. This process can be described as a combination of natural substance, which is the gene of the patient, combined with the drug that is determined as the remedy for the disease. It is not possible to carry out the entire process without all of the above steps. Many laboratories and doctors, try to claim this process as patent eligible, stating that the process is their own invention and has required individual efforts to determine the process.

However, the lower courts are still not clear on this issue: when can a process that involves a natural process be defined as patent eligible?

Defining the limits of biotechnology patents is one of the most Herculean tasks patent communities are faced with today. Within the recommended system, innovators would be rewarded adequately, but innovation would still be allowed without considerable delay and prohibitive costs.

According to the Section 101, it states that whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.

However, a few of the recent judgments of the court with the patent eligibility cases under Section 101 have raised a question whether the biotechnology inventions resulted in “transformations” of body chemistry. These transformations in giving a patient prescribed drugs and testing the patient's blood for a naturally occurring correlation are enough to validate a patent for the correlation.

I have chosen the below article as my reference,

Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. (10-1150)...