CFJ Essay: A Patent, a Blood Test, and 20 Years of Waiting
- Jeffrey Depp
- Jul 17
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
Committee for Justice Senior Counsel for Law and Policy Jeffrey E. Depp has published a new essay at Truth on the Market, “A Patent, a Blood Test, and 20 Years of Waiting.” The piece examines what the two-decade journey of Abbott’s traumatic-brain-injury blood test—from university research to routine clinical use—reveals about the strengths and growing weaknesses of America’s life-sciences innovation system.
A Breakthrough Twenty Years in the Making
The test can provide physicians with results in approximately 15 minutes and help determine whether an adult with a suspected traumatic brain injury needs a CT scan. Its development required the combined efforts of university researchers, federal research programs, a startup, patent owners, investors, technology-transfer professionals, clinical collaborators, regulators, and, ultimately, a large commercial partner capable of manufacturing and distributing the test at scale.
Patents and the Path from Laboratory to Bedside
That successful division of labor demonstrates how patents and secure property rights allow specialized innovators to cooperate across the long and uncertain path from scientific discovery to patient care. University researchers can concentrate on scientific discovery, startups can undertake entrepreneurial development and validation, and established commercial partners can supply the manufacturing, regulatory, and distribution capabilities needed to bring an invention to patients at scale.
The TBI test is therefore more than a medical breakthrough. It is a case study in how intellectual-property rights support specialization, voluntary cooperation, private investment, and the commercialization of early-stage research.
The Cost of Making Patients Wait
But the essay also asks a harder question: Should an important diagnostic advance really require approximately 20 years to reach patients?
It examines how regulatory delay, the Supreme Court’s judicially created exceptions to patent eligibility, and the resulting uncertainty surrounding Section 101 can increase costs, alter investment decisions, and encourage innovators to construct more complicated patent portfolios simply to preserve commercially meaningful protection.
The article argues that Congress should restore a clear and constitutionally grounded approach to patent eligibility rather than layering additional interventions onto problems created by earlier ones.
Applied Austrian Economics in Practice
More broadly, the essay advances a recurring theme in Depp’s recent scholarship: Applied Austrian Economics.
Rather than treating the work of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Public Choice scholars as abstract intellectual history, this approach applies their insights about purposeful human action, dispersed knowledge, institutional incentives, entrepreneurial discovery, and unintended consequences to concrete problems in intellectual property, technology regulation, and innovation policy.
The TBI test offers an especially powerful case study. Decentralized human judgment, private property rights, and organizational specialization ultimately brought a remarkable technology to the bedside. At the same time, regulatory and judicial interventions made that journey longer, more costly, and less predictable than it needed to be.
A Better Standard for Innovation Policy
The article’s central lesson is that innovation policy should be judged not merely by how well it regulates today’s technologies, but by how effectively it enables tomorrow’s discoveries to reach the people who need them.
