Breast Cancer Gene Patents Invalidated

I just received a link to today's Our Bodies Ourselves blog post announcing a decision by a judge in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan that invalidates the patents held by Myriad Genetics for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The US Judge said in the ruling that the "isolated DNA is not markedly different from native DNA as it exists in nature” and thus aren’t novel enough to qualify for patent protection. OBOS had joined the suit brought last summer by the ACLU against Myriad, the US Patent and Trademark Office and the University of Utah Research Foundation. Read the blog post for links to the decision and more information about the lawsuit.