Supreme Court Mulls Personalized Med

The high court considers the legitimacy of a patent on the relationship between blood tests and patient health.

Written byBob Grant

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The US Supreme Court heard arguments this week in a patent trial that could change the nature of personalized medicine. The case involves pharmaceutical and diagnostic company Prometheus Laboratories, which filed patents on instructions for monitoring the levels of certain metabolites in the red blood cells of patients with Crohn's disease and other gastrointestinal autoimmune disorders to optimize drug dosing. The case made it to the country’s highest court after Prometheus sued Mayo Collaborative Services in 2004 for trying to market its own version of the test.

At the heart of the matter is whether the correlation between blood test results and patient health is patentable. According to patent law, "observation of a natural phenomenon" is not patentable, while "application of an observation of a ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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