So why this suit now? It may be a function of ACLU interests/funding/politics, but I suspect it may also have something to do with the sense that a significant group of Supreme Court justices, led by Justice Breyer, are concerned about “this kind” of patent. And that this Supreme Court concern may be evoking a mirrored reflection from the Federal Circuit, at least in some areas, such as business patents.

Whether this leads to a victory for the plaintiffs, at any level, remains to be seen. Some of the ACLU claims (First Amendment violation?) seem a stretch (or two). Even if the plaintiffs win, a decision that knocked out, say, composition of matter patents but did not affect patents on using the sequence for discovered purposes (like predicting breast and ovarian cancer risk) might not ultimately be much of a victory. And all of this is against a backdrop of the limited lifetime of human wild-type sequence patents, some of which have already expired and more of which will be expiring with each passing year.

I’m not a patent scholar, but I have had to learn something about gene patents. I’d be interested in people’s thoughts about this suit.