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| Luxembourg: home to the Court of Justice and place where AGs sometimes get it right ... |
"Verica is is the AG who caused all the confusion over “one SPC per patent” and “subject matter of the invention” in Medeva. If she is off the scene, then perhaps these ideas will have fewer supporters in the referrals on these points in Actavis v Sanofi, Lilly v HGS etc. Credit where credit is due, though - she got Neurim absolutely right!"
3 comments:
Tsk, tsk. Another Neurium vigilante, furthering the cause for re-writing the law for SPCs. Credit where credit is due? See what Mr Justice Arnold had to say about Neurium in gefitinib: 'As discussed above, Synthon and Generics suggest that the answer to this question is "yes", while Neurim suggests that the answer is "no". I prefer the reasoning in Synthon and Generics to that in Neurim. The reasoning in Synthon and Generics has the advantage that it is consistent with Pharmacia, MIT and Yissum. Neurim is not only inconsistent with all those earlier decisions, but also appears to me to place undue emphasis on the SPC Regulation's first objective and to give insufficient weight to its second and third objectives and the actual wording of the Regulation."
Anonymous, does that mean that you do not believe that the right conclusion was reached in Neurim?
Personally, I think that the result was fair enough, as it meant that an SPC was awarded to an applicant who had to provide a full package of clinical and pre-clinical data. However, I'm not at all enamoured with the reasoning that the Court used to reach that result - as it leaves us all with even more uncertainty that we started with!
The confusion regarding Neurim seems to stem from the way in which the CJEU wrote it's judgment -- the judgment certainly could have been more clearly phrased.
But the AG's opinion was unusually well written and clear, I thought. So I have to agree with whoever posted the original article on this.
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