- Court
- Madras High Court
- Date of judgment
- Judge
- Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy
- Outcome
- Dismissed
Headnote
Appeal and writ petition dismissed and the refusal under section 3(i) upheld. The claimed method sequenced nucleic acid molecules from a maternal sample to determine their size distribution against reference values. The Court held that although the claims delimit the monopoly, the embodiments in the complete specification can and should be examined to decide whether a process is per se diagnostic, and those embodiments stated that a difference in size beyond a cutoff allows a diagnosis of fetal chromosomal aneuploidy to be made. A person skilled in the art could therefore arrive at a diagnosis by this process. Neither definitive nor comprehensive diagnosis is a prerequisite to being diagnostic, so it did not matter that a doctor would follow up with chorionic villi sampling or amniocentesis.
Headnote by BRB Legal, written from the judgment: a summary for reference, not legal advice.