Pharmaceutical and Biotech Patent Law provides you with the legal, scientific, and technical information you need to help clients obtain, defend, and challenge patents in these important business areas. This practical guide shows you how to craft problem-free patent applications, including how to partner with the government to bring patented inventions quickly to the marketplace - invalidate competitors' patents by proving that they fail to meet key requirements - protect against various forms of patent infringement - and successfully rebut charges of infringement. It includes detailed checklists that help you resolve thorny patent problems in the complex pharmaceutical and biotech fields, and is regularly updated to reflect Federal Circuit rulings and other significant court decisions.

American patent law has reached an unprecedented crossroads, prodded by a landmark Supreme Court decision this spring and the prospect of sweeping new federal legislation this fall. At this critical time, Biotechnology and the Patent System: Balancing Innovation and Property Rights provides a timely look at the complex issues involved in making patent law for cutting-edge high-tech industries such as the biotechnology and computer software sectors.

In todayês technological world, biotechnology is one of the most innovative and highly invested-in industries for research, in the field of science. This book analyses the forms and limitations of patent protection recognition for biotechnological inve

Exploring the relationship between competition law and technology pools, this book provides general-purpose details of the biotechnology patent pool scheme while discussing historical developments, approaches of the US Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and the European Union Competition Commission via EU regulations. In addition to these regulatory approaches and evolution in concept and theory of technology pools, this book illustrates relationship issues including tying arrangements and essential facility consideration vis-à-vis technology pools. It analyzes the modalities of forming such pools in the area of biotechnology, specifically illustrating that the formation of technology pools is possible and can be safely undertaken, and proposes a viable solution and structure. Patent pools in the biotechnology industry will pave the way towards open collaborative research, reducing patent thickets. Formation of such pools will increase access to various technology and patents otherwise out of bounds, resulting in a reduction of licensing costs and a spur in the development of new solutions. Most importantly, such pools will reduce the frequency of patent toll gates, making the entire spectrum of research interesting from the perspective of researchers as well as investors. This book will be an aid to researchers studying intellectual property, patents, and biotechnology, as well as to interest groups including funding agencies, venture funds, angel investors, and proponents of the open-source movement.

Advances in modern biotechnology have produced profound and far-reaching implications for the relationship between humans, animals and the environment. As a result, a debate has arisen surrounding the legal, moral and social problems connected with this technology, a central part of the debate focusing on the role of moral considerations in the patent system as a form of regulation. This fully revised and updated book examines this role and asks why in the context of biotechnological inventions, morality has become an important issue. It takes account of recent developments, including reference to the situation in Australia. By examining such specific recent cases, the author elucidates the moral concerns associated with modern biotechnology, thus providing an important contribution to the debate and a valuable resource for all those working in this exciting field.

This volume assembles papers commissioned by the National Research Council's Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) to inform judgments about the significant institutional and policy changes in the patent system made over the past two decades. The chapters fall into three areas. The first four chapters consider the determinants and effects of changes in patent "quality." Quality refers to whether patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) meet the statutory standards of patentability, including novelty, nonobviousness, and utility. The fifth and sixth chapters consider the growth in patent litigation, which may itself be a function of changes in the quality of contested patents. The final three chapters explore controversies associated with the extension of patents into new domains of technology, including biomedicine, software, and business methods.

The patenting and licensing of human genetic material and proteins represents an extension of intellectual property (IP) rights to naturally occurring biological material and scientific information, much of it well upstream of drugs and other disease therapies. This report concludes that IP restrictions rarely impose significant burdens on biomedical research, but there are reasons to be apprehensive about their future impact on scientific advances in this area. The report recommends 13 actions that policy-makers, courts, universities, and health and patent officials should take to prevent the increasingly complex web of IP protections from getting in the way of potential breakthroughs in genomic and proteomic research. It endorses the National Institutes of Health guidelines for technology licensing, data sharing, and research material exchanges and says that oversight of compliance should be strengthened. It recommends enactment of a statutory exception from infringement liability for research on a patented invention and raising the bar somewhat to qualify for a patent on upstream research discoveries in biotechnology. With respect to genetic diagnostic tests to detect patient mutations associated with certain diseases, the report urges patent holders to allow others to perform the tests for purposes of verifying the results.

Patents protecting biotechnological invention are becoming ever more important. Because biotechnology has many differences with respect to other technologies, lessons learned in other fields of technology cannot simply be transferred to adopt a suitable strategy for dealing with biotechnology inventions. In this volume, general aspects of biopatent law will be discussed. This involves questions of patentability, including ethical issues and issues of technicality, as well as questions of patent exhaustion in cases were reproducible subject matter, like cells or seeds, is protected. Moreover, active and passive patent strategies are addressed. Further, insight will be given into patent lifetime management and additional protective measures, like supplementary protection certificates and data exclusivity. Here, strategies are discussed how market exclusivity can be extended as long as possible, which is particularly important for biopharmaceutical drugs, which create high R&D costs.