Jeff Leek, Reeves Anderson, and I recently wrote a correspondence to Nature (subscription req.) regarding the Supreme Court decision in Mayo v. Prometheus and the recent Institute of Medicine report related to the Duke Clinical Trials Saga.
The basic gist of the correspondence is that the IOM report stresses the need for openness in the process of developing ‘omics based tests, but the Court decision suggests that patent protection will not be available to protect those details. So how will the future of personalized medicine look? There is a much larger, more general, discussion that could be had about patents in this arena and we do not get into that here (hey, we had to squeeze it into 300 words). But it seems that if biotech companies cannot make money from patented algorithms, then they will have to find a new avenue.
Here are some slides from a recent lecture I gave outlining some of the ideas and providing some background.