The LabCorp v. Metabolite case had me thinking … how often do patentees write claims that focus on an assaying-and-correlating sequence of the type under review in LabCorp?

I don’t have an answer to that question.  I can, however, share the results of three searches of the PTO’s database of issued patents.  One can do full-text searching of the claims back to 1976.  From that time to this, the PTO has issued more than 3 million utility patents.  Searching all the claim language, I can report that, as of today (Monday, June 26), there are …

• 101 patents with claims that contain both the terms “correlating” and “assaying”
• 12,245 patents with claims that contain the term “correlating”
• 2,226 patents with claims that contain the term “assaying”

No wonder some folks were worried about the LabCorp case.