No. 3: Section 101 continues to develop for pharmaceutical and
life science patents
In a pair of decisions earlier this year, the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Federal Circuit applied the two-step
Alice
framework to life science patents. While the
Boehringer v.
Mylan ruling felt like a straightforward decision following
Vanda, the later
Illumina v. Ariosa case provided
significant discussion, along with a Circuit Judge Jimmie Reyna
dissent. In that decision, the court ultimately held that while the
claimed methods utilize the natural phenomenon discovered by the
inventors, they employed a physical process step to selectively
remove fragments of cell-free fetal DNA and were therefore patent