McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP partners Steven Sarussi
and James Suggs co-authored an article entitled, “Natural Products: Patentable in the United States?” that appears in the January 2015 online edition of COIN Connections. The USPTO recently released a set of guidelines for patent examiners to use when determining whether an invention is patent-eligible subject matter. Until recently, natural products purified from their natural environment were considered to be patent-eligible subject matter. However, in the Myriad case, a naturally-occurring DNA was held not to be patentable subject matter — even in isolated or purified form. The guidelines are meant to be instructions for applying the Supreme Court’s reasoning to other nature-based products. View the article