Patent Policy and Promoting Advances in Personalized Medicine.

Patent Policy and Promoting Advances in Personalized Medicine. ls Mayo good patent policy? Is it good health care policy? On what does your answer depend? The cost of personalized medicine research? The riskiness of personalized medicine research? The extent to which it constrains medical practitioners and downstream innovators? Suppose that the costs of collecting and evaluating DNA, which are falling precipitously, drive the cost of personalized medicine research. Does that affect your view?

Suppose Congress were to decide that the determination of novel and non-obvious correlations between known drug treatments and individual responsiveness based on molecular biology research merited patent protection. Similarly, suppose Congress were to decide that the determination of novel and non-obvious algorithms merited patent protection. Could Congress amend § 101 to include the following: “Applications of newly discovered laws of nature and algorithms shall be eligible for patent protection so long as the claimed invention is new, non-obvious, and useful when viewed as a whole.” Would such an approach effectively eliminate the patentable subject matter inquiry? How would the claims in Alice and Mayo fare under that test?