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Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]

supremecourt.gov

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Re: Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]

#121

Post by shmerl »

daughart wrote: post #118
shmerl wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say goodbye to it if that will be patentable. Someone will patent all combinations - and goodbye.

I suspect you are a troll, but I will respond anyway... Sequence space is very large. There are only a total of 8 million US patents. There are 16 million 12-base-pair nucleotide sequences. To patent the sequence space of a functional product and regulatory region would require more patents than there are molecules in the universe. Also to patent something you have to show use.

I was showing sarcasm. Patenting a molecule is a ridiculous idea, but you insist that it's about the process of making it. I'm pointing out that the result is not about the process, but about the molecule.

Re: Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]

#122

Post by shmerl »

daughart wrote: post #120
ryusage wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have with it is that, in all cases, any synthetic DNA could exist in nature. We can't even verify with 100% certainty that any given sequence doesn't already exist in nature. If it doesn't exist already, it could in the future, naturally, through evolution.

As I pointed out to shmerl above, sequence space is very large, and in general sparsely populated. A functional gene product and regulatory sequence is often thousands of base pairs. 4^1000 = 10^600. There are only 10^80 molecules in the universe. So if you have done truly de novo design, you can be pretty sure it doesn't exist somewhere else by random chance. That being said, I think that even if you take a natural…

Again, getting into arguments of making molecules patentable because there are so many combinations available is bizarre. Why not make numbers patentable as well - there is an infinite amount of them.

Re: Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]

#123

Post by [deleted] »

daughart wrote: post #118
shmerl wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say goodbye to it if that will be patentable. Someone will patent all combinations - and goodbye.

I suspect you are a troll, but I will respond anyway... Sequence space is very large. There are only a total of 8 million US patents. There are 16 million 12-base-pair nucleotide sequences. To patent the sequence space of a functional product and regulatory region would require more patents than there are molecules in the universe. Also to patent something you have to show use.

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]

#124

Post by [deleted] »

daughart wrote: post #116
alsocasey wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that a hypothetical diagnostic attempting to sequence this region would likely be pre-processed with a PCR to facilitate sequencing of only the region of interest... this necessarily involves a cDNA step. You could sequence the whole genome at higher depth, but this would be more expensive. Edit: My mistake, the patent covers the reverse transcription step exclusively, not the act of transcription in gen…

PCR is not covered by the patent, only reverse transcription of the processed RNA molecule to cDNA. There are many flavors of genomic PCR that are fine under this interpretation, including a rapid SNP-detecting digital qPCR.

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]

#125

Post by daughart »

shmerl wrote: post #121
daughart wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you are a troll, but I will respond anyway... Sequence space is very large. There are only a total of 8 million US patents. There are 16 million 12-base-pair nucleotide sequences. To patent the sequence space of a functional product and regulatory region would require more patents than there are molecules in the universe. Also to patent something you have to show use.

I was showing sarcasm. Patenting a molecule is a ridiculous idea, but you insist that it's about the process of making it. I'm pointing out that the result is not about the process, but about the molecule.

I genuinely don't understand your point.

If a group of people synthesize and test many synthetic DNA sequences and then patent the useful ones, that seems fine to me. You might even call them "synthetic biologists". They have invented new things, which are not found in nature, by the process of their own skills, knowledge, and labor, and which are useful to other people. It seems perfectly reasonable that those inventions should be protected by the patent system.

Re: Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]

#126

Post by shmerl »

daughart wrote: post #125
shmerl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was showing sarcasm. Patenting a molecule is a ridiculous idea, but you insist that it's about the process of making it. I'm pointing out that the result is not about the process, but about the molecule.

I genuinely don't understand your point. If a group of people synthesize and test many synthetic DNA sequences and then patent the useful ones, that seems fine to me. You might even call them "synthetic biologists". They have invented new things, which are not found in nature, by the process of their own skills, knowledge, and labor, and which are useful to other people. It seems perfectly reasonable that those inven…

I find the concept of patenting new biological entities rather scary and dangerous. They should not be patentable. Patent system is easily abused for many things unrelated to encouraging innovation. Therefore there is nothing reasonable in allowing these patents just because it takes time and effort to come up with synthesis method.

Re: Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]

#127

Post by michaelhoffman »

RabbitAngstrom wrote: post #26

A co-worker in my lab pointed out that Myriad's stock is actually rising [1] after the decision.The best guess is that Myriad's competitive advantage is shifting to the enormous amounts of BRCA sequences they have obtained -- this would increase the cancer-vs-normal mutation prediction power considerably. [1] - http://www.google.com/finance?cid=658315

Not anymore.

Re: Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]

#129

Post by michaelhoffman »

rflrob wrote: post #44
JosephBrown wrote: post #13

An mRNA strand that is about to be translated into a protein has the introns removed, so how is the cDNA different enough from the naturally occurring mRNA other than it is a mirror image? Also, when did cDNA come to mean composite DNA instead of complementary DNA? This seems made up to imply some kind of invention instead of it just being the mirror image of the DNA molecule.

I am a biologist (who regularly sequences cDNA), and it is properly understood to mean complementary DNA. In fact, the syllabus' description of the process is far enough from what the process of actually making cDNA is like that it seems to me there could be grounds for a challenge, even though as others have noted, cDNA is no longer widely used for these kinds of diagnostics.

The syllabus is not part of the decision and has no legal effect (it says this at the top of every syllabus), so wouldn't be grounds for a challenge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Detroit_Timber...

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