Panel session 2 of the second day of the Congress was a discussion session about biosimilars. Moderator Dominic Adair (Partner, Bristows (UK)) led his panellists Fritz Reiter (Regulatory CMC Team Leader, Sandoz GmbH (AT)), Prof. Mei-Hsin Wang (National Yunlin University of Science and Technology (TW)) and Bryan Zielinski (Vice-President, Assistant General Counsel, Pfizer (US)) through…

by Vanessa Rieu The first panel session of the AIPPI Milano conference – an “additional session”, crammed in early on the Sunday morning, focused on Brexit and its implications for IP. Moderator Prof Cesare Galli (IP Law Galli), and panellists Sarah Matheson (AIPPI Reporter General), Gordon Harris (Gowlings WLG (UK)), Francesca Giovanni (OSHA Liang (FR))…

Earlier this year, the Commercial Courts of Barcelona published a decision which shows that patent owners cannot obtain “Diligencias para la comprobación de hechos” (“Proceedings for the Verification of Facts”; a procedure roughly equivalent to the French “Saisie-contrafaçon“) in Spain unless they carefully prove that the application fulfils certain conditions. In particular, in its Decision…

In a much-anticipated series of judgments, running to some 579 pages, the EU’s General Court on 8 September 2016 upheld a 2013 decision of the European Commission that imposed fines of almost €150 million on the innovative pharmaceutical manufacturer, Lundbeck, and a number of generic manufacturers with whom Lundbeck had entered into agreements to settle…

A post-Brexit UK can stay in the Unitary Patent system, although a number of criteria would have to be met. That is the opinion of leading counsel Richard Gordon QC and Tom Pascoe of Brick Court Chambers, who were asked by the IP Federation, the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys and the Intellectual Property Lawyers…

A federal district court did not err in finding that a “cow monitoring system” developed by Netherlands-based Agis Automatisering did not infringe the “rumination” and “estrus” patents held by VocalTag Ltd. and SCR Engineering Ltd., respectively, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled. The district court’s grant of summary judgment to…

A technical teaching making use of a discovery, e.g. of a natural law, for achieving a particular result is patent-eligible, irrespective of whether or not it has an “inventive excess” beyond the purposeful exploitation of the natural law. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.

On 9 September 2016, the Full Federal Court of Australia delivered its judgment in Actavis Pty Ltd v Orion Corporation [2016] FCAFC 121 (Actavis).  The proceedings concerned the infringement/revocation of a patent for Stalevo, Novartis’ 3-in-1 Parkinson’s disease drug. A related issue was whether Novartis Pharma AG (Novartis) was the exclusive licensee of Orion’s 765932…

The Italian Chamber of Deputies, the Parliament’s lower house, has approved the draft bill on ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA). According to a report of the Società Italiana Brevetti (SIB), there were 302 votes in favour, 108 against and 25 abstentions. The bill will now go to the Italian Senate. Despite the Brexit vote…