Plausibility

Enforcement, evidence, Inventive step, Litigation, Novelty, Patents, Pharma, Pharmaceutical patent, Plausibility, Prior art, Revocation, Second Medical Use, Sufficiency of disclosure, United Kingdom, Validity

, (Bristows)/

On 4 December 2020, the English Patents Court handed down its decision in Neurim Pharmaceuticals (1991) Limited & Flynn Pharma Limited v Generics UK Limited (t/a Mylan) & Mylan UK Healthcare Limited, the main action proceedings regarding Neurim’s patent for Circadin™, EP 1 441 702 (“EP 702”).  The judgment is available here. Many readers will…

Plausibility

(Clifford Chance)/ /1 Comment

One of the actors that has been seeking to pop-up in the European patent theatre in recent decades is plausibility. As readers will be aware, the debate around plausibility initially arose at the European Patent Office in the mid-1990s (T 939/92, AgrEvo) at a time when applications with extremely broad claims were in vogue, particularly…

European Union, Patents, Pharma, Pharmaceutical patent, Plausibility, Second Medical Use, SPC, United Kingdom

(Bristows)/

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…

European Union, Pharma, Pharmaceutical patent, Plausibility, Second Medical Use, SPC, United Kingdom

, (Bristows)/

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,…

Australia, Case Law, Litigation, Patents, Pharma, Pharmaceutical patent, Plausibility, Sufficiency of disclosure, Validity

, (Clayton Utz)/

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…

AI, EPC, EPO, Plausibility

(GJE Intellectual Property)/ /2 Comments

The European Patent Office (EPO) is receiving ever increasing numbers of patent applications that include a ‘programmed computer’ as a key part of the described invention.  Moreover, this growth in filings is being seen in technical fields that are not traditionally considered to be computer-centric.  For example, according to EPO statistics, 40% of new patent…

Case Law, Infringement, Netherlands, Plausibility, Trade secrets

(Hoffmann Eitle)/

The Court confirmed that a District court, not specialised in patent matters, does have relative jurisdiction to decide a motion to produce exhibits for determining patent infringement. In order to positively decide a motion to produce exhibits, (threat of) infringement should be made plausible, but the threshold for plausibility is relatively low. Further, technical details…

(Indirect) infringement, Case Law, Infringement, Litigation, Patents, Pharmaceutical patent, Plausibility, Sufficiency of disclosure, United Kingdom

, , , (Bristows)/

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…