The doctrine of sound prediction – a possible tool to support patenting black box algorithms for personalized medicine?

Black box medicine relies on algorithms and computer systems to discover new complex relationships over time, based on information patterns, to generate recommendations for treatments to achieve improved health outcomes. As such, black box medicine is based on a predictive model without explicit knowledge. The limit on patents for diagnostic methods and algorithms has largely focused on the issue of patentable subject matter. Much less explored is the inherent lack of transparency and inability to provide full and precise disclosure to satisfy the sufficiency and utility requirement to patent black box algorithms.