A Manhattan judge ruled Monday that two genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer are "the law of nature," thereby nullifying seven patents by Myriad Genetics of Utah. Prior to the decision, women wishing to be tested for the indicators would have had to consult with the patent holder—at a cost of $3,000—but now the monopoly no longer applies.
Myriad argued that while isolating BRCA1 and BRCA2 in its labs, it created chemicals that don't exist in nature, but the judge didn't buy that rationale, reports the Times. "It is the sequence created by nature that is the entire point of the gene," Myles Jackson, a professor at Polytechnic Institute, wrote in a court submission. One of the plaintiffs in the case, Dr. Wendy Chung, called the ruling "a game changer," considering that for-profit institutions and researchers have already laid claim to about 20 percent of the human genome, more than 4,300 genes in total.
Many experts, like Genomics Law Report's John Conley and Dan Vorhaus think the ruling may not stick. "As breathtaking as this opinion may be...another federal district judge would be free [to] reach exactly the opposite conclusion tomorrow," they wrote. Genomeboy predicts the case will go all the way to the Supreme Court, since Myriad has invested too much to see its patents crumble.
