The UK Supreme Court today handed down its decision in Actavis v ICOS. The decision was unanimous, with Lord Hodge giving the only judgment. The case concerns two principal questions. First, how the test for obviousness applies to a dosage patent; and secondly, whether the Court of Appeal was entitled to reverse the judgment of…

On 1 February 2019, the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court granted an injunction against Mylan AB’s sale of the product Tadalafil »Mylan« containing 5 mg tadalafil in Denmark. On 7 September 2018, Eli Lilly Danmark A/S (“Eli Lilly”) brought a case to the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court requesting a preliminary injunction against Mylan AB…

On 4 March 2019, we uploaded a post noting that the English Patents Court had decided to refer a question to the CJEU on whether it was permissible for a patentee to rely on a third party’s MA to obtain an SPC in the absence of consent from that third party. We briefly summarised the…

On Friday 1 March 2019, Arnold J handed down his judgment in the patent dispute between Eli Lilly and Genentech regarding IL-17A/F antibodies*1. This lengthy judgment, which as the Judge observed: “was one of most complex patent cases I have ever tried”, is littered with interesting legal points. However, to many life sciences patent lawyers,…

In nullity proceedings initiated by Accord Healthcare (“Accord”) the District Court of The Hague has held Shire-NPS Pharmaceuticals’ (“NPS”) patent EP 1 203 761, the basic patent for an SPC covering cinacalcet, invalid for lack of inventive step and declared the SPC null. In short, the court considered that the (selection of) cinacalcet provided no…

Two recent decisions in the UK and Australia in the long-running pregabalin litigations demonstrate the different approaches in these jurisdictions to determine if a patent specification has sufficiently disclosed an invention.  Readers will recall that the judgments concerned Warner-Lambert’s Swiss-style claims for the use of the compound pregabalin (marketed as Lyrica) in the treatment of…

In the Netherlands, Minister for Health Care Bruno Bruins clashed with Novartis last month about lutetium-octreotaat, after the Swiss pharma company had fivefolded the price of this cancer drug, an ‘orphan medicine’ for patients with neuroendocrine tumors. It is the latest of a series of controversies about medicine pricing. Kluwer IP Law discussed the case…

The Court of Appeal overturned the Patent Court’s first instance decision concerning the validity of one of ICOS’s patents (licensed to Eli Lilly) covering a 1 to 5mg dosage form of tadalafil (Cialis®) for oral administration up to a maximum of 5mg per day for the treatment of sexual dysfunction.  The Court held that the…

Today, after nine months of waiting, the decision of the UK Supreme Court in the pregabalin litigation was handed down. Like Brexit and the nation, it is clear that the Supreme Court Judges were divided on several crucial issues. In this post, we will not attempt to give a detailed analysis of the decision but…

In a decision issued this summer, the Swiss Federal Patent Court had the opportunity to comment on the catalogue of grounds for invalidity which can be brought against a Swiss SPC. The Federal Patent Court issued a PI based on Genzyme Corporation’s Swiss SPC for sevelamer, although it was unclear whether the Swiss Institute of…