Supreme Court Declines to Consider Medical Diagnostic Patents

The U.S. Supreme Court stayed out of the debate over what types of medical diagnostic tests can be patented, leaving companies that discover ways to diagnose and treat diseases based on patients’ unique characteristics in legal limbo.

The justices rejected an appeal by Quest Diagnostics Inc.’s Athena unit that sought to restore its patent for a test to detect the presence of an autoimmune disease. A lower court had ruled in favor of the nonprofit Mayo Clinic that the test wasn’t eligible for a patent because it merely covered a natural law -- the correlation between the presence of an ...