Supreme Court drops patent process case

In a dissenting opinion, three justices said they would have heard the case because of the effects it could have on medicine.

By Amy Lynn Sorrel, AMNews staff. July 24/31, 2006.

The U.S. Supreme Court in June, without explanation, dismissed from its docket a patent case that could have set boundaries for what types of medical discoveries can be patented.

By declining to hear Laboratory Corp. v. Metabolite, the court left in place a 2004 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling in which judges let Metabolite patent a process that correlates high homocysteine levels with vitamin B deficiency. Metabolite sued LabCorp when the company developed another way to test the relationship and refused to pay royalties. The appeals court ruled in favor of Metabolite, finding that LabCorp caused its labs to infringe the patent whenever its physicians performed the correlation in the diagnostic tests.

The medical community watched the case closely because of the stifling impact doctors believe overly broad patents could have on research and the practice of medicine. The American Medical Association, joined by five other medical groups, filed a friend-of-the-court brief, contending that "upholding a claimed patent on a scientific fact would directly undercut the goal of making diagnostic treatment advances widely accessible."

Metabolite's patent also puts doctors in danger of infringement in the course of routine patient care, organized medicine's brief said.