Supreme Court Denies Certiorari in Closely Watched Athena Case
On January 13, 2020, after its conference on January 10, 2020, the United States Supreme Court denied certiorari in Athena Diagnostics Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Services, LLC, No. 19-430--despite the unusual situation of several Federal Circuit judges requesting the Supreme Court take up the case.
In Athena, the patent holder sued for infringement of a patent directed to a diagnostic test that required detecting the presence of certain antibodies by contacting the sample with a radioactive-labeled protein. The district court dismissed the case, ruling the patent invalid based on 35 U.S.C. § 101 pursuant to Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., 566 U.S. 66 (2012), as claiming a law of nature as opposed to a patentable invention.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the decision. See Athena Diagnostics, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Servs., LLC, 915 F.3d 743, 753-54 (Fed. Cir. 2019). And on July 3, 2019, the Federal Circuit denied Plaintiff Athena’s petition for rehearing en banc. 927 F.3d 1333 (Fed. Cir. 2019). The denial of the petition, however, led to eight separate concurring and dissenting opinions from active Federal Circuit judges, an unusually large...
