Girard, 43, was one of six patients who sued Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City over the company’s patenting of two gene mutation tests associated with breast and ovarian cancer. The Supreme Court said that company can’t own naturally occurring genes but can patent synthetic strands of DNA that it creates in a laboratory. The high court’s unanimous judgment reverses three decades of patent awards by government officials. It throws out patents held by Myriad Genetics on an increasingly popular breast cancer test brought into the public eye recently by actress Angelina Jolie’s revelation that she had a double mastectomy because of one of the genes involved in this case. Myriad developed tests on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that are associated with breast and ovarian cancer and charged around $3,500 for the test, Girard said. She wanted a second opinion after being diagnosed with breast cancer at 36 and testing positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation. But she couldn’t get a second opinion because of the company’s patent, she said.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 18:42:00 +0000
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