This is an editorial page. Blue boxes are sourced fact; amber boxes are Panacea Bio Chem's opinion. We keep them apart because the Myriad opinion itself was an exercise in keeping things apart — discovery from invention, nature from ownership.
Notice what pharma did next, because it is the strongest proof that the Court got the balance right. The industry did not stop inventing; it stopped enclosing. The money moved from claiming nature's sequences to engineering real analogues — semaglutide is a natural hormone's backbone, modified by human hands until it does something nature's version cannot. That is precisely the bargain Chakrabarty and Myriad describe: invention rewarded, discovery left free. When a patent system channels effort into genuine chemistry instead of fence-building, everyone — including the patent holders — ends up richer.
Here is the uncomfortable corollary of a ruling we celebrate. Myriad made natural peptides unownable — and unownable molecules are unfundable, because no one can charge monopoly rent to recover a billion-dollar trial programme. So the natural peptides sit in a regulatory no-man's land: not condemned by evidence, never given the chance to produce any. We believe the honest fix is not to re-patent nature but to fund open, precompetitive human studies on unpatentable compounds — publicly, transparently, with the data belonging to everyone. Justice Thomas freed the genome. Somebody still has to fund what grows on free ground.
KFF's Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust (January 2025) puts trust in the CDC at 61% (from 66% in June 2023), with trust in the FDA and in state and local public health officials each down by double digits in the same window. KFF, January 2025.
We read those numbers as a warning to people like us, not just to agencies. When regulators stumble, the space fills with two kinds of voice: the grifter selling certainty, and the nihilist selling despair. The Myriad story offers a third posture — the one we try to hold. Respect the institutions enough to use them properly: the ACLU used the courts, Ostrer used his standing, the Court used a century of doctrine, and the result was a correction more thorough than any bonfire. Distrust should make us more demanding of evidence, not less. Nothing on this site is medical advice, and no page on it will ever sell you a molecule — that is our small contribution to a slower, more honest trust.
By patenting what is genuinely engineered: modified peptide analogues (semaglutide, liraglutide, insulin analogues, PEGylated and cyclized forms), formulations, devices and processes — not natural sequences.
Largely economics: a natural sequence cannot be patented as a composition of matter after Myriad, so no exclusivity exists to repay the trial pathway; without trials, no approval. The evidence was never funded — not lost.
That the label is no shelter: FDA has warned companies selling unapproved semaglutide, tirzepatide or retatrutide products falsely labeled "for research purposes" or "not for human consumption."
KFF (January 2025): CDC trust 61%, down from 66% in June 2023; trust in the FDA and in state/local public health officials each down by double digits over the same period.