Federal Court: You Can’t Patent DNA Obtained From a Known Protein

April 6, 2009

The court declared that an invention owned by Amgen Inc. in Thousand Oaks, California, was so obvious as to be unpatentable. The invention, first discovered by scientists at Immunex near Seattle, Washington, and then sold to Amgen, was the sequence of a gene for the protein NAIL, important in the human immune response. (ScienceInsider)