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Parties to the case
The case arose in a dispute between Mayo Collaborative Services and Prometheus Laboratories concerning a diagnostic test. Mayo Collaborative Services is a for-profit diagnostic testing lab offering diagnostic services that operates as a subsidiary of Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, which is a nonprofit corporation affiliated with the Mayo Clinic. Mayo Collaborative Services does business as "Mayo Medical Laboratories", has 3,200 employees working in 58 laboratories and offers services worldwide.

Prometheus is a specialty pharmaceutical and diagnostics company in the fields of gastroenterology and cancer, based in San Diego, California. It was formed in 1995 and was bought by Nestlé in 2011. It has platforms in gastrointestinal medicines, autoimmune diseases, and therapeutics in the field. It also specializes in diagnostic sciences, and develops therapeutic drugs as well as therapeutic drug monitoring. Prometheus sells diagnostic kits and offers diagnostic services as a diagnostic testing lab. It has 405 employees, and earns a revenue of about 102.17 million USD each year.

Opinions critical of the decision
As argued by Timo Minssen and David Nilsson of the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property :"It remains debatable if the Court has provided the correct answer to the underlying main policy question, and if the Court did sufficiently consider all the factors and evidence relevant to such considerations in this important field of technology. Moreover, considering the law from both a socio-economic and a systematic perspective, it remains indeed controversial if, or at least to what degree, the patent-eligibility question under § 101 is the right forum to address these issues. When balancing the risk of excluding potentially important emerging technologies from patent-eligibility with the potentially stifling effects of overly broad claims during the early stages of such technologies, a strict application of the novelty, obviousness, utility and sufficiency criteria in combination with proper post-grant mechanisms might provide not only an equally efficient and flexible, but also a more sensitive and systematically coherent and thus better solution."

Opinions supportive of the decision
On the other hand, those in favor of the decision found it "a very high quality piece of legal craftsmanship" that "may well be the Supreme Court's finest work in the patent-eligibility field." Dr. Robert Wah, Chairman for the American Medical Association, said that the Supreme Court had "prevented irreparable harm to patient care with today's unanimous decision to invalidate two patents that gave Prometheus Laboratories exclusive rights over the body's natural responses to illness and medical treatment", and said that the decision was "a clear legal victory that ensures critical scientific data remain widely available for sound patient care and innovative medical research."

Another commentator, Professor Richard H. Stern, who teaches computer law at The George Washington University Law School, praised the decision because in it "the court for the first time agreed upon a full harmonisation of its prior and at times seemingly inconsistent judgments on patent-eligibility and how to determine it." In the same vein, this commentator praised the decision for reaffirming earlier precedents such as O'Reilly v. Morse and Neilson v. Harford, which the lower court in the Mayo case had ignored or seemingly misunderstood.

A business-oriented commentator viewed the decision as seeking to strike a balance between competing policy considerations:"While the collective groans of patent professionals the world over are hard to ignore after the decision in Prometheus, it was a necessary evil to safeguard against the likely potential for financial posturing of companies with exclusive rights over processes of the human body. Ultimately, the conclusion in Prometheus is premised upon the public policy consideration that certain types of medical and diagnostic findings should not be afforded patent protection, as the need for unencumbered access to critical scientific data and study in the medical community overwhelms any alleged monetary disincentive suffered by the patent applicant. The Court recognized that patent protection should not serve as a stumbling block for continued scientific innovation and improvement in medical treatment methodologies."Lawrence S. Perry and Jacqueline A. DiRamio of the Pharmaceutical Patent Analyst Journal claim that:"Scientists and researchers should not be dissuaded from undertaking future research in optimizing diagnostic testing and drug dosages. While Mayo v. Prometheus has generated uncertainty as to the patentability of such subject matter, the decision ultimately is more likely to affect patent practioners than scientists and, hopefully with some clarification from lower courts, will direct them to draft patent applications in ways that protect novel and beneficial diagnostic tests without raising issues under 35 U.S.C. §101 [6]."