Supreme Court drops patent process case

The U.S. Supreme Court in June, without explanation, dismissed from its docket a patent case that could have set boundaries for what types of medical discoveries can be patented.

By declining to hear Laboratory Corp. v. Metabolite, the court left in place a 2004 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling in which judges let Metabolite patent a process that correlates high homocysteine levels with vitamin B deficiency. Metabolite sued LabCorp when the company developed another way to test the relationship and refused to pay royalties. The appeals court ruled in favor of Metabolite, finding that LabCorp caused its labs to infringe the patent whenever its physicians performed the correlation in the diagnostic tests.

The medical community watched the case closely because of the stifling impact doctors believe overly broad patents could have on research and the practice of medicine. The American Medical Association, joined by five other medical groups, filed a friend-of-the-court brief, contending that "upholding a claimed patent on a scientific fact would directly undercut the goal of making diagnostic treatment advances widely accessible."

Metabolite's patent also puts doctors in danger of infringement in the course of routine patient care, organized medicine's brief said.

The case caught the business community's attention, as well. Business leaders argued that not allowing such patents would impede the investment needed to further biomedical research.

In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter, said they would have taken up the case. "To fail to do so threatens to leave the medical profession subject to the restrictions imposed by this individual patent and others of its kind," Breyer wrote.

At the AMA's Annual Meeting in June, delegates voted to initiate a study of the ethical issues related to the use of patents, trademarks, copyrights and confidentiality agreements that limit access to new medical procedures and techniques.