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The appeals court ruled against Myriad in another part of the case, however. The court said that Myriad’s patent claims on the process of analyzing whether a patient’s genes had mutations that raised the risk of cancer was not patentable because it involved only “patent-ineligible abstract mental steps.”
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The result that the gene is patentable but that the test is not patentable is intriguing.
From the standpoint of genetic research, I may not care whether I have the gene itself, but I do care whether I can test for the gene and its mutations. For example, if my methodology needs to isolate the gene in order to test for it (e.g. exome sequencing), then the "isolation patent" prevents me from using this methodology but allows me to find another methodology that does not require isolation (e.g. whole-genome sequencing).
