The Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBoA) decided that as a matter of principle, a European patent is to be granted for an invention which meets the patentability criteria, and, as such, the principle of a narrow interpretation is to apply to clauses excluding patentability, for instance of diagnostic methods. For a method to be considered a diagnostic method, it must include all the steps relating to it. There is no diagnostic method if one of the steps is lacking. Hence, such claims are excluded if they include the feature relating to all the diagnostic steps and involve interactions with the human or animal body.