Diagnostic Patents Suffer Another Setback In US As Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Sequenom Appeal

from the outbreak-of-good-sense dept

In recent years, there have been a couple of really important US Supreme Court decisions in the biotech field. One is the 2013 judgment striking down gene patents. The other is a ruling from 2012 that rejected the patenting of basic medical diagnostics, in a case involving Mayo Collaborative Services and Prometheus Labs. The resultant loss for biotech companies in terms of devalued patent portfolios, and their reduced ability to control the market using intellectual monopolies, has been so serious that it is no surprise that there are periodic attempts to get these decisions mitigated through subsequent court rulings.

For this reason, the industry has been watching with great interest a case involving Sequenom, and its patent on a non-invasive pre-natal diagnosis test using the fact that fetal DNA is present in the blood plasma of expectant mothers. A lower court invalidated that patent on the basis of the Mayo decision, and Sequenom appealed to the Supreme Court to review the ruling. But a statement from the company has now dashed the biotech industry's hopes:

The Supreme Court of the United States denied [Sequenom's] petition to review decisions by lower Federal courts that the claims of Sequenom's U.S. Patent No. 6,258,540 ("'540 Patent") are not patent eligible under the patent eligibility criteria established by the Supreme Court's Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories decision. In the petition, Sequenom urged the Court to hear the case because the Court is uniquely suited to reconcile and interpret the patent eligibility criteria established in its Mayo decision. Sequenom will pursue no further appeal opportunities for review of the '540 Patent.

Although the industry will doubtless whine about how there is no incentive to produce new diagnostic tests, there's no evidence that research and development in this area has ground to a halt in the US since the Supreme Court ruling on Mayo. All that has happened is that obvious applications of natural biological phenomena have been removed from patentability. Given the inherent reasonableness of that, we can probably hope that further challenges to Mayo will also fail.

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Filed Under: biotech, gene patents, patents
Companies: sequenom

DailyDirt: Fountains Of Youth...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Lab mice aren't really a great model model for studying human health, but we use them anyway. And every so often, researchers stumble on drugs that seem to make lab mice live longer. Unfortunately, no one has found a reliable treatment for significantly extending a human lifespan just yet -- but if you want to raise old mice, there are plenty of things that'll work. Check out a few of these potential fountains of youth for mice.

• The first human clinical trials using nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) to slow the aging process should begin soon -- on a small sample of 10 healthy people. NMN works remarkably well in mice, but no one knows yet how well it will work in people. If it's safe enough, though, it's a good bet that people will be adding this stuff to vitamins ASAP.
• A hormone, osteocalcin, injected in old mice appears to allow the rodents to run just as far as much younger mice. Old mice that weren't given this hormone ran about half as far, so researchers are planning to try this in people next.
• If rapamycin works to delay the onset of certain diseases in mice, maybe it'll work... on our pet dogs? And if Fido lives a bit longer and healthier, maybe we'll try it ourselves, too. (Eating our own dogfood..?)
• How about chemical precursors to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) to try to keep yourself young? You can buy this stuff right now as a supplement, if you'd like to participate in your own highly unscientific study....

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Filed Under: aging, biology, biotech, health, immortality, life extension, lifespan, longevity, medicine, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, nicotinamide mononucleotide, osteocalcin, rapamycin

DailyDirt: Chickens Versus Eggs...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The American food chain can be fascinating, as well as disgusting. There are happy, free-range chickens. There are also apparently a lot of very unhappy, caged chickens. The treatment of farm animals seems to vary quite a bit, and the economics of the food industry doesn't always account for the well-being of animals. However, the situation may be slowly changing as more humane techniques are developed, but until science figures out how to grow tasty meat in a petri dish, we'll still have to kill animals if we're going to continue to eat them.

• By 2020, nearly all US chicken egg producers will stop the practice of culling male chicks. Male chickens that aren't specifically bred to grow fast (and obviously can't lay eggs) are economically useless to the chicken industry. So instead of killing male chicks in a blender shortly after they hatch, their embryos will simply never be allowed to gestate significantly. The chicken GATTACA future is here.
• Vegans have discovered an egg substitute called aquafaba that's very simple to obtain. It's just chickpea brine -- the leftover water from a can of chickpeas. This stuff can be whipped like eggs and baked in a variety of desserts.
• Japanese high school students have shown the world that a chicken egg can be incubated without a shell -- and still produce a live chick. This isn't the first time this technique has been used, but it's probably the first time an obscure scientific paper's procedure have been reproduced and watched online by millions of people.

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Filed Under: aquafaba, biotech, chicken, chickpea, farming, food, in-ovo sexing, murderless meat, vegan egg

DailyDirt: Antibiotic Resistance Is (Not) Futile...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

With the news that a "superbug" resistant to an antibiotic of last resort was found in the US, there's a bit of concern that medicine could regress significantly in the face of uncontrollable bacteria. We've had antibiotic drugs for about 70 years now, and we've grown accustomed to the effectiveness of these drugs. Hopefully, we can stay ahead of drug-resistant microbes with new pharmaceuticals or phage therapy.

• Antibiotic resistance sounds like a new problem, but ancient microbes have been found with genes that make them resistant to modern drugs. DNA from 30,000-year-old permafrost shows that there were "superbugs" well before we even discovered antibiotic compounds. [url]
• Waste water from various sources can obviously cause antibiotic-resistant bacteria to emerge. Heavy metal contamination in waste water may be a contributing factor, not just waste from residential sewage systems. [url]
• If you're looking for a hand sanitizer that doesn't irritate your skin, try some quaternary ammonium salt formulations. Sure, you could use alcohol-based lotions or diluted chlorine solutions, but those ingredients can dry out your skin if you use them a lot. [url]

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Filed Under: antibiotics, bacteria, bacteriophages, biotech, drug discovery, health, medicine, microbes, phage therapy, pharmaceuticals, superbugs

DailyDirt: Strange Forms Of Life...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Nature has plenty of surprises left for us. Life exists in some extreme environments that you wouldn't think anything would survive, but somehow little creatures are still thriving in some of the coldest, darkest, most acidic, hottest and just unusual places. Life just needs to be able to feed on something -- light, sugar, electricity. Here are just a few bizarre discoveries in biology.

• Mitochondria are commonly called the "powerhouses" of complex living cells, and biologists have been looking for years to see if there are any examples of eukaryotes that do not have mitochondria. They've finally found an example -- in the gut of a pet chinchilla -- but it is NOT the missing link of eukaryotic evolution. This microbe's ancestors are known to have mitochondria, so this particular organism somehow lost its mitochondria and managed to survive using other non-mitochondrial mechanisms. [url]
• There are a few photosynthetic animals in nature. And if you're really into transhumanism or biohacking, maybe humans can engineer a symbiotic way to metabolize sunlight and forget about eating or breathing. [url]
• Some "electric bacteria" can feed directly on electrons flowing from an electrode. These "electricity breathers" in sediment have been found in vastly different locations in California, and researchers have identified at least 8 different kinds of electric bacteria. [url]

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Filed Under: animals, bacteria, biohacking, biology, biotech, electric bacteria, extremophiles, life, microbes, mitochondria, photosynthesis

DailyDirt: Feeding A Growing Population...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Modern farming is evolving yet again as technology makes growing crops more efficient with increasingly clever tricks. Maybe it's not such a good idea to mess with plant DNA to insert interspecies genes, but maybe there's no reason for increasing crop yields or produce quality, anyway. Biologists are messing around with gene expression pathways instead, so they don't need to change the DNA present -- just when or how the genes are (or aren't) activated. And better fertilizers could be on the way, too. Check out a few of these farming developments.

• There's a way to grow 50% more corn by taking advantage of a newly-discovered regulatory pathway in the plant that controls the stem cell growth of corn (and possibly other crops as well). The resulting ears of corn don't look all that pretty, but significantly more kernels per ear of corn increases crop yields without necessarily using more land or other resources. The researchers are still just exploring this new way to boost corn growth, and if you like eating corn on the cob -- these mutant ears of corn might make you lose your appetite. [url]
• Maybe you've never heard of the Haber-Bosch process, but it's essential for farming since it's been used to create fertilizer (ammonia from nitrogen gas) for about 100 years now. It's an energy intensive process, so the Department of Energy is looking for alternatives that are scalable, more sustainable and don't require fossil fuels. [url]
• Pesticides and GMO crops may be replaced with RNA interference sprays that can kill bugs or alter plant genetic expression. Genetic sprays wouldn't necessarily require GMO crops at all since a sprayed-on solution of RNA could effect desirable results without needing to change any plant DNA. Genes could be turned off at will with a spray, making plants more drought tolerant or poisoning insects by crippling their natural development. [url]

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Filed Under: ammonia economy, biotech, corn, dna, farming, fertilizer, genetic sprays, genetics, gmo, haber-bosch process, rna interference

DailyDirt: Digging Up The Past

from the urls-we-dug-up dept

Though replete with accurate models, well-tested theories and millions of specimens, we're still a long, long way from having a complete picture of the history of life on earth. New discoveries can still upend everything or point to entire unexplored aspects of our prehistory — and yet, slowly but surely, scientists are building a catalog of all that can be known about living things. Here are some of the latest projects helping to fill in branches on the evolutionary tree:

• After over 60 years known only as the "Tully Monster", Illinois' 300-million year old state fossil has finally been identified. Turns out it's a relative of modern lampreys, and what researchers thought was its gut was actually a proto-backbone. [url]
• Scientists in Chile have genetically altered chickens to grow "dinosaur legs" like their prehistoric ancestors. They aren't trying to build Jurassic Park, just to better understand how avian dinosaurs evolved into modern birds. [url]
• The world's oldest land fossil is a fungus that was feeding on something even older. Scientists have long puzzled over its exact role in evolutionary history, but it may have given rise to the first complex-plant-bearing soil. [url]

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Filed Under: biology, biotech, chickens, dinosaurs, evolution, fossils, gmo, life, prehistoric animals, tully monster

DailyDirt: GMO, GMO, Wherefore Art Thou, GMO?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Genetically modifying animals and plants is a growing concern -- with some people totally against the idea. And there are now a variety of biotech tools that make defining GMOs a bit less clear-cut for the general public. Taking a gene from a sea animal and putting into a pig sounds extremely unnatural, but does simply removing a gene sound as bad? Or what if farmers used traditional breeding techniques to get to a particular genetic end goal that was discovered by less "natural" genetic experimentation?

• If scientists merely remove genes, not add any new genes, does that qualify as a genetically modified organism? Using CRISPR/Cas9 techniques, a researcher created a button mushroom that doesn't brown after it's cut -- by removing some genetic material to turn off an enzyme -- and the USDA says that's not a GMO mushroom. (However, this decision may change.) [url]
• There are at least a couple engineered genetic "kill switches" for genetically modified microbes. Have researchers not seen/read Jurassic Park? Or Blade Runner? [url]
• Off-patent generic GMO soy beans are starting to enter the market since it's been about 20 years since Monsanto developed them. Out of about 84 million acres of soybeans planted in the US, only a couple thousand or so acres will be seeded with generic Roundup Ready knockoffs. Monsanto has a Roundup Ready 2 variant that's still under patent protection (as well as another version still pending approval), so don't worry about not being able to buy the authentic stuff. [url]

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Filed Under: biotech, crispr, genetically modified organism, gmo, jurassic park, kill switch, roundup ready
Companies: monsanto

DailyDirt: Making Backups Of Your Organs

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Organ transplant procedures are becoming amazingly complex and reliable. Still, it's a good idea to try to keep your original equipment in good working order. But if you do start having an organ fail on you, it's nice to know there are some options -- and the options are getting better. Here are just a few advances in getting donor organs that don't necessarily involve other people dying.

• Tens of thousands of people are on a waiting list for a kidney transplant because it's not easy to find a matching donor. About 3,000 new patients are added to the list (in the US alone) each month, but a new procedure called desensitization could make organ rejection far less common -- and improve the odds for people looking for a kidney transplant. This method could also be suitable for other organ transplants, but it requires a living donor -- so it's a bit easier to find "spare" kidneys than, say, livers. [url]
• Roughly 4,000 patients in the US are waiting for a heart transplant. Growing a heart from stem cells in a lab might be possible someday, and researchers have gotten a tiny step closer to doing so. It's just not easy to grow tens of billions of cells into a functioning adult heart -- unless you're a baby. [url]
• There are "farms" already trying to grow human tissue inside pigs and sheep -- perhaps developing a way to grow human hearts, kidneys, livers or any other organ on demand. These "human-animal chimeras" aren't being funded with federal NIH funds, but there are other agencies and research groups working on "humanized" animals. Lab mice have been successfully altered to grow a rat pancreas, so it's likely that other animals should be able to grow viable human organs as well. [url]

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Filed Under: biotech, chimerism, health, hearts, kidneys, medicine, organ transplant, stem cells, xenotransplantation

DailyDirt: We Are Star Stuff And Genetic Mistakes...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The history of evolution has been largely erased by time and poor record keeping. Sure, we still have a few genomes that look remarkably similar to ancient organisms, and we can try to make some educated guesses about how life on earth developed. We might even be able to re-animate some extinct animals, but we'll never be able to re-capture the full environment and complex ecology that no longer exists for our most distant ancestors. Still, it's fascinating to study evolution and to try to witness it in action.

• The first multi-cellular organism lived about 800 million years ago, and no one knows how that happened exactly. The rise of multi-celled life relied on a protein (GK-PID) that happens to result from a mutation on a single gene. Without this minor change, life on earth could be little single-celled organisms (or not-so-little single celled creatures like Gromia sphaerica). [url]
• Since 1954, some Japanese researchers have kept fruit flies in the dark to breed them for 1,500 generations (and counting) to watch how mutations might help these flies adapt to living in total darkness. Sequencing the genome of Drosophila melanogaster specimens reveals dozens of possible genes that deviate significantly from normal flies and enable these flies to detect pheromones better (among other things). It might take a lot longer to witness the evolution of a new species (if we can agree on how to define a species, that is), but this dark-fly project also might not last much longer. [url]
• About 500 million years ago, an invertebrate animal mistakenly inherited twice its usual genetic material with a extra copy, and then that genetic doubling happened again in the next generation. These kinds of mistakes happen from time to time, and they're sometimes unstable -- but genome duplications can also lead to more complex cellular communication systems and novel protein developments. [url]

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Filed Under: biology, biotech, dark fly project, drosophila melanogaster, evolution, genome, gk-pid, gromia sphaerica, life, multi-cellular organisms, proteins, single celled organisms