In a spine-chilling announcement, the US Department of Justice in October said unmodified human DNA should not be eligible for patent. The department's stance conflicts with the body of case law on the matter and a longstanding position held by the US Patent and Trademark Office, which has issued more than 10,000 of these patents. The Justice Department announced its position in response to a lawsuit involving patents on breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. A US district court in March declared the patents invalid, saying that the genes are products of nature rather than human-made inventions. Patent holders University of Utah and Myriad Genetics, based in Salt Lake City, appealed in June. In an amicus brief filed with the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals the Justice Department agreed that identifying and isolating DNA without further manipulation is not an invention, or patent eligible. How the agency's declaration will influence justices and the patent office worries biotech companies. But the patent office isn't easily swayed, says Thomas Kowalski, an attorney with Vedder Price in New York. “The patent office is not going to change what it's doing in view of what the Department of Justice says,” he says. Besides, international agreements between the American, European and Japanese patent offices, known as Trilateral Co-operation, have concluded that unmodified DNA is patentable.