The District Court for the Northern District of Ohio dismissed
Cybergenetics Corp.'s infringement suit after determining
that the asserted claims—which recite mathematical algorithms
for analyzing data taken from a DNA sample—are patent
ineligible under the Alice two-step framework. That is,
the court ruled that the claims are directed to an “abstract
idea” and do not include an “inventive
concept.”
The Cybergenetics patents at issue—U.S. Patent Nos.
8,898,021 and 9,708,642—describe a variation of a traditional
method of identifying an individual based on a DNA sample. The
traditional method uses “PCR (polymerase chain reaction)
amplification” to transform the DNA sample into data that are
unique to an individual and thus can be used to identify that
individual. The method is not useful, however, when the sample
contains DNA from multiple sources because the transformed data are
“mixed” and do not correspond to one individual.
