WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a lawsuit by CareDx over organ-rejection tests made by Natera and Eurofins Viracor, turning down another request to revisit the contentious issue of patent eligibility. The justices turned away CareDx's appeal of a lower court's ruling that invali
WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a lawsuit by CareDx over organ-rejection tests made by Natera and Eurofins Viracor, turning down another request to revisit the contentious issue of patent eligibility.
CareDx sued Austin, Texas-based Natera and Viracor, a Kansas-based subsidiary of Luxembourg's Eurofins Scientific, in 2019, accusing them of infringing patents related to its AlloSure blood test for monitoring kidney transplants. The patents, which CareDx licenses from Stanford University, cover methods of measuring levels of an organ donor's DNA in a transplant recipient's blood to predict whether their body will reject the organ.
The patent-focused US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled last year that the patents were invalid, affirming a Delaware federal judge's decision that they relate to the unpatentable idea of detecting natural phenomena. The Supreme Court last addressed patent eligibility in the 2014 case Alice Corp v CLS Bank International, which helped establish a two-part eligibility test along with a 2012 ruling on diagnostic patents, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories. The test requires courts to determine if an invention involves an unpatentable abstract idea, natural phenomenon or law of nature - and if so, whether it includes an inventive concept that would make it patentable.