When a company is not prepared to charge a socially acceptable price in the Netherlands for a medicine, the government should use other instruments such as compulsory licences, encouraging pharmacy preparation and allowing patients to order medicinal products abroad in order to ensure that the medicine is available for patients. The Dutch Council for Public…
On 23 October 2017, IP Australia released the draft Intellectual Property Laws Amendment (Productivity Commission Response Part 1 and Other Measures) Bill 2017 for public comment. The purpose of the Bill is to implement the Government’s response to the Productivity Commission’s recommendations on Australia’s IP Arrangements (our coverage of the Government’s response can be found…
Last year, Actavis, Teva and Mylan (“Actavis”) sought revocation in the English Patents Court of two patents relating to tadalafil, which is sold by Eli Lilly (“Lilly”) as the active ingredient in CIALIS® to treat erectile dysfunction and pulmonary arterial hypertension. As is the usual course, ICOS (the patentee) and Lilly (the exclusive licensee) subsequently…
Allergan’s assignment of the patents on one of its blockbuster drugs to an American Indian tribe in an attempt to dismiss a USPTO inter partes review (IPR) proceeding on “tribal sovereign immunity” grounds has shaken up the patent bar – with some dismissing this as, at most, a temporary loophole and others saying “why didn’t…
Patent lawyers in the UK have spent the last three months pondering, debating and at times indulging in an element of despair (to put it mildly) about what might be the impact of the judgment of the Supreme Court in Actavis v Eli Lilly [2017] UKSC 48 on issues of validity (see here). Today they…
The Court of Intellectual Property has exclusive jurisdiction to revoke patents. The mandatory arbitration court established by Law 62/2011 cannot declare the nullity of a pharmaceutical patent even if the issue is raised merely as a defence and with effects limited to the parties to the proceedings. A full summary of this case has been…
Since Warner-Lambert successfully defended its pregabalin patent and obtained injunctions against generic market entry in Apotex Pty Ltd v Warner-Lambert Company LLC (No 2) [2016] FCA 1238 (see our coverage of the case in ‘Carving out the principles: a comparative review of the Australia and UK Lyrica cases’), the Australian Lyrica dispute has continued through…
Pharmaceutical polymorph patents are regarded as effective means and important secondary pharmaceutical patents to extend the life cycle of pharmaceutical patent protection. However, the inventiveness evaluation criteria for pharmaceutical polymorph patents have become much stricter in China while the amount of patent application keeps soaring. The clinical research of pharmaceutical polymorphs commenced in 1950s internationally…
