Press Release
Press Release
Press Contacts: Erik Cummins, Matt Hyams, Taina Rosa, Olivia Meyer
10.14.25
On October 8, Pillsbury Intellectual Property partner Richard Blaylock appeared before the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property to present his views on the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act. Blaylock appeared along with some of the leading luminaries in the field from academia to technology and law, including two former directors of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.
The legislation would expand the scope of inventions eligible for patenting to essentially all useful processes, machines, manufactures or compositions of matter and overrule two centuries of U.S. Supreme Court precedent, including a series of recent 9-0 decisions, that held that abstract ideas, natural phenomena, laws of nature and non-inventive applications of them using conventional technology are not eligible for patenting under U.S. patent law.
Blaylock, who also testified on similar legislation last year, argued that the proposed law “would cause substantial harm to the research and clinical community as it relates to genetic testing by privatizing new medical knowledge.”
He explained that while the human genome has been sequenced and therefore the genes themselves can’t be patented, researchers continue to discover biomarkers in the form of variants in patient genes that can indicate a greater risk for diseases or greater suitability of certain drug therapies. The ability to detect these variants is critical to effective personalized medicine. If adopted in its current form, “newly discovered biomarkers and their clinical relevance would suddenly become patentable eligible and allow their discoverers to preempt all others from detecting such biomarkers in the practice of medicine.” Doing so, he said, “would slam the door shut on such innovation.”
To watch the hearing or to read Blaylock’s testimony, please click here.