Federal Circuit Patent Updates - April 2016

April 8, 2016 11:18 AM

Dyk, J. Affirming dismissal for failure to state a claim because the asserted claim was ineligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The asserted claim was directed to a law of nature and thus failed the first step of the Mayo/Alice test. "Claim 1 is directed to the relationship between non-coding and coding sequences in linkage disequilibrium and the tendency of such non-coding DNA sequences to be representative of the linked coding sequence – a law of nature." Patentee argued unsuccessfully that the claim's requirement of analyzing amplified DNA "to detect the allele" satisfied the second step of the Mayo/Alice test. The claim term "'to detect the allele' (in the sense of examining the non-coding region to detect an allele in the coding region) is a mental process step, one that provides [the claim] with a