The Court of Justice of the European Union released on Thursday, December 18, 2014, the judgment in the Case C-364/13.
A body unable to evolve into a human being is not a human embryo in the Directive regarding the legal protection of biotechnological inventions.Therefore, the uses of such a body for industrial or commercial purposes can, in principle, be patentable.
The Directive regarding the legal protection of biotechnological inventions provides that the uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purposes are not patentable.
In the Brüstle judgment from October 18, 2011, the Court held that the term ‘human embryo’ includes unfertilized human egg cells which by parthenogenesis, were stimulated to divide and grow as long as these egg cells are also, like the embryos created by the fertilization of an egg cell, likely to trigger the development of a human being.