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…

EPC, European Union, Legislation

(ANDREA SOMMER Patentanwälte PartG mbB)/

Visser’s Annotated Patent Convention, the 2018 Edition, previously known as the Annotated European Patent Convention, was published on 15 December 2018. The new 2018 edition of this preeminent work – the only regularly updated authoritative article-by-article commentary in English on the European Patent Convention (EPC), its implementing regulations, and associated case law – provides the complete text of the…

Case Law, Denmark, EPC, EPO Decision, Inventive step, Netherlands, Opposition, Patents, Switzerland

(Hoffmann Eitle)/ /12 Comments

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…

Case Law, Inventive step, Netherlands, Prior art

(Hoffmann Eitle)/

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…

Case Law, Infringement, United States of America

(Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US)/

The same claims a jury found mobile carrier Sprint liable of infringing were later held invalid under Section 101 by the Federal Circuit in an appeal brought by cell provider T-Mobile. The judgment against Sprint had not been made final. Case date: 01 February 2019 Case number: No. 2018-1108 Court: United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit…

Netherlands, Pharma, Pharmaceutical patent

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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…

Case Law, Netherlands

(Hoffmann Eitle)/

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…

Case Law, EPO, EPO Decision, European Union, Novelty

(GJE Intellectual Property)/

This recent decision from an EPO Board of Appeal is a rather satisfying development in how patentability (especially novelty) of purity claims is assessed at the EPO.  This case may be seen as patentee-friendly, particularly for the pharmaceutical sector, as it likely extends protection for APIs.  It will become especially important to review this case…