This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
has handed down a pair of opinions concerning Section 101 in the
field of pharmaceuticals and life sciences. In both cases, the
district courts held claims of the patents at issue invalid for
lack of patentable subject matter, and in both cases, the federal
circuit reversed, finding the claims to be patent eligible.
The first case, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc. et
al. v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. et al., No. 2019-1172 (Fed.
Cir. March 16, 2020), on appeal from the U.S. District Court for
the District of New Jersey, concerned a patent claiming methods of
treating metabolic diseases such as diabetes in a specific subset
of patients for whom metformin, the traditional and widely used
treatment for these diseases, is contraindicated by administering a
DPP-IV inhibitor. The district court granted judgment on the
pleadings under Rule 12(c) that the asserted claims were directed
to ineligible subject
