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…
In a post yesterday our colleagues at Vossius commented on the CJEU’s decision, which had just been handed down in Abraxis*. As Vossius have explained, although the decision appears to give clarity for new formulations of old products, it remains unclear as to how this can be reconciled with Neurim, which was not overturned. In…
It seems to be a more and more realistic scenario that the UK may leave the European Union on March 29, 2019 without an agreement. A lot has been written about the effect of such a “hard Brexit” on trade in general and –more interesting to us working in the patent field- on the future…
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,…
The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (BVerfG) intends to decide on the complaint against German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement this year. The case (2 BvR 739/17) is on the 2019 decision list, which was published yesterday. It doesn’t come as a surprise. The UPCA case was on the 2018 list as well,…
In a summary assessment of costs, where the parties had drawn up and agreed costs budgets prior to trial, the Court confirmed that each phase of the budget was to be considered separately and two phases could not be combined where one was overspent and the other was underspent. The budget was a guideline which…
The Court of Appeal upheld the first instance decision that the patent in suit lacked novelty and inventive step over the prior art. The Court confirmed, following Halliburton v Smith, that despite the fact the parties had reached a confidential settlement and Sony was not involved in the appeal, it was necessary to hear the…
The Court of Appeal upheld a decision of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court that the patent in suit was novel and inventive over the prior art. In construing the numerical ranges of the patent, the Court of Appeal pointed out that the purpose of a comparative example is that identifies something outside the claimed invention…
It is often said that ‘tomorrow never comes’. Likewise, a recurring theme for some years has been that ‘the UPC will start next year’. As 2019 is now well under way, it is time to consider whether this year we can be more optimistic than this, and how the turmoil in the UK Parliament affects…
