Access to seized goods and data should be denied in preliminary proceedings if the seized material contains trade secrets and there is a serious chance that the patent will be held invalid. Case date: 01 February 2019 Case number: C/09/557229 / KG ZA 18-771 Court: Provisions Judge of the District Court of The Hague A full summary of…
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…
The fundamental question which types of products are amenable to SPC protection and which types of marketing authorizations allow the filing of SPCs has aroused much controversy in Europe, and reached a climax when the CJEU in its judgment Boston Scientific (C-527/17) of 25 October 2018 denied the grant of SPCs on the basis of…
A few days ago, our Kluwer News Blogger reported on a decision in the Netherlands, holding two Dutch patents for processing the Ethiopian grain “teff” as null and void. While this decision certainly has a political dimension, which formed the focus of the reports in the general press and the report from the Norwegian Fridtjof…
On 16 January 2019, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the Dutch part of Eli Lilly and Company’s patent EP 1 313 508 is valid. The judgment was handed down in an invalidation action brought by Sandoz International GmbH. EP 508 relates to the use of pemetrexed in combination therapy with vitamin B12…
A court in the Netherlands has ruled that two Dutch patents for processing teff, a kind of grain which has been used for thousands of years to make injera, the fermented pancake that Ethiopians eat with their meals, are null and void. The Ethiopian government has welcomed the verdict. The patents had led to outrage…
The EPO’s Problem-Solution-Approach is, on the face of it, simple and widely applied also in the national jurisprudence of the EPC member states. It starts with the determination of a “closest prior art document” (CPAD) which is to serve as the starting point of the further analysis. It is then evaluated which technical differences exist…
Relevant prior art may prove not to be useful as a starting point for an attack on inventive step if the prior art teaching is negated by later studies before the effective date of the patent claims. In such a case, the skilled person would not have had an expectation of success. Case date:16 January…
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…
In preliminary proceedings, the risk that a company will potentially suffer greatly as a result of the decision is a factor that has to be taken into account by the court. Case date: 28 December 2018 Case number: C/09/555970 / KG ZA 18-694 Court: Provisions Judge of the District Court of The Hague A full summary of this…
