Such options relevant to accessing essential medicines include: exclusions to patentability; exceptions to patent rights; parallel importing; compulsory licensing and promotion of generic drugs.
In-house access to patent Markush data could provide improved informatics support to the drug discovery process, both to enable patentability criteria to be added to computer-assisted drug design, and to expand the techniques available for data-mining in the patent literature.
On a day-to-day basis, my job involves advising on all areas of patents: I write patent applications, persuade patent offices all over the world to grant patents to my clients, defend and attack patents, perform patentability and right-to-use searches, as well as advise on patentability and infringement issues and patent portfolio strategy and management.
Without the reinterpretation of patenting criteria that occurred in the 1980sc, which extended patentability rights to plants and animals with modified genetic traits [29] the technique of genetic engineering may well have been developed as part of a larger basic research plan in molecular biology, but Syngenta's (and others') commercial GM crop plants would have never been developed.
In accordance with Article 27§1 of the TRIPS Agreement, "patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application", subject to the exceptions to patentability set out by national legal orders.
The World Trade Organization has permitted countries to provide exceptions to patentability for such subject matter; Europe and Canada have availed themselves of such an exception, and the United States has not.
Contrary to global practice, India added a unique and ambiguous standard to patentability, the so-called "enhanced efficacy," which may contravene international agreements.
They may also include policies adopted by governments, such as regular compulsory licensing where patents exist, or limiting patent grants through strict patentability criteria and procedures to facilitate pre- and post-grant oppositions on patent applications.
One caveat, though, is that if a counterparty to a non-disclosure agreement discloses the invention in violation of the agreement before the inventor has filed for patent protection, patentability may be lost [ 23].
The USPTO is still considering whether to reexamine the patentability of Versata's '350 patent in a separate ex-parte reexamination proceeding based on prior art, notes Arner.
