Thanks to Sang Young LEE and Kevin Kyumin LEE of Kim & Chang for some news from Korea - reproduced below. There is no published decision available yet, and we will post it once it appears.
"In contrast to some foreign jurisdictions where the patent scope during PTE covers all types of use, Article 95 of the Korean Patent Act stipulates that PTE patent scope should be restricted to the specific use of the approved originator product. It was generally considered that the use of medical inventions should refer to the target disease of the approved products but there has been no judicial precedent supporting how Article 95 should be interpreted on this issue.
This changed on July 1, 2020 when the Korean Intellectual Property Trial
and Appeal Board (IPTAB) rendered a historic decision regarding the type of "use"
that is considered within the enforceable patent scope during the PTE of a
pharmaceutical compound patent. Galvus®
(API: vildagliptin), a type 2 anti-diabetic drug of Novartis, has five
different types of dosage regimens (or efficacy and effect under the Korean
translation). Utilizing the fact that
Novartis filed a PTE application based on only one approved efficacy and
effect, three Korean generic companies filed scope confirmation actions
claiming that their products did not fall within the patent scope because they
had carved out the efficacy and effect first filed by Novartis as the basis for
the PTE. They argued that the patent
scope during the PTE should be limited to the first approved efficacy and
effect only, and that the later approved four efficacies and effects were not
covered.
An expanded five-member panel of the IPTAB held that the use (and
therapeutic effect) that is within the patent scope of the compound PTE is not
limited to the first efficacy and effect, and that the generic's products were
within the scope of the patent during PTE ruling in favor of Novartis.
The IPTAB's detailed reasoning was as follows:
l If the scope of a patent during
PTE is restricted to specific items of an approved product underlying the PTE
(first approved effect and efficacy in this case), it becomes easy for generic
companies to circumvent the patent during PTE when it relied on most of the
approval data of the original products in gaining approval of its product. This violates the purpose of the PTE system
which is to compensate the non-practicing period of the patentees.
l The Supreme Court held in a
previous case ("Vesicare® case") that the patent right during the PTE
should not be limited to the specific items as approved. The Vesicare® case involved the issue of
whether patent scope during the PTE for a compound patent is limited to specific
salt forms of the approved product. The
Supreme Court held that the patent scope during the PTE should be determined
based on the active ingredient, therapeutic effect, and use of an approved
product underlying the PTE and not limited to the specific items as approved.
l Compound patents during PTE
should be more broadly protected than dosage regimen patents considering the
different technical significances (meaning that a dosage regimen as approved as
efficacy and effect should not limit the scope of compound patents).
l The efficacy and effect in a
marketing approval is governed by regulatory laws and is dependent on various
factors including the type of disease and approval schedule, etc. Thus, it is unreasonable to confine the scope
of a patent based on efficacy and effect, which has a different legislative
focus from patent law.
The IPTAB decision can still be appealed to the Patent Court so is not
yet the final say on this issue. However,
we believe this is a significant first step in improving understanding in the
patent system of how the use of a medical invention should be defined during
PTE, and has the potential to affect many originator pharmaceutical companies
that rely on PTE to protect their products.
The IPTAB rejected the generic's efforts to unjustly narrow the PTE
scope, and thereby laid the groundwork for originators to protect their
legitimate interests from generic challenges as well as preserve the originator
drug price after generic entry."
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