Posted by: Arturo Reyes in Reyes Fenig, Pharmaceuticals, Patents, patent, MPTO, Mexico, IP litigation, intellectual property, Drugs, Drug patents, claims, appeal on
May 05, 2010
The linkage system
For many years, a usual complaint from patent owners of pharmaceutical products was that the Mexican FDA -Comisión Federal para la Protección contra Riesgos Sanitarios, better know by its acronym COFEPRIS- was encouraging patent infringement by issuing marketing authorizations for patent-infringing drugs.
On 2003, the President amended the Reglamento de la Ley de la Propiedad Industrial or Rules of the Industrial Property Law and the Reglamento de Insumos para la Salud or Rules for Health Supplies to create a "link" between the Mexican Patent and Trademark Office (MPTO) and the Mexican FDA.
According to the amended Rules of the Industrial Property Law, the MPTO must publish every six months an updated list of patented drugs, identified by the name of the active ingredient.
The extension of life of patents in Mexico
The Mexican Constitution states that the exclusivity rights provided therein for inventors are "temporary privileges".
Without entering into the discussion about the language used in the Constitution, it is clear that one of the characteristics of the exclusivity rights on inventions is the temporality.
Temporality may vary according to each specific intellectual property right. For example, the term of a registered utility model is only 10 years counted from the filing date, while the term of a patent is, as a general rule, 20 years counted from the filing date.
In this post I will briefly discuss the extension patents, and specifically the only case of patents extension currently allowed by Mexican law, although probably without having that
Ranbaxy Laboratories, an India based Drug Company and Pfizer have settled a court dispute over Lipitor, cholesterol lowering drug. The dispute started in 2003 regarding a generic version of the drug that was marketed by Ranbaxy.
Pfizer also sue Ranbaxy over patents expiring in 2016 regarding the active ingredient in Lipidor.
The Settlement allows Ranbaxy to market the generic version in 2011, keeping copies of the cholesterol pill of the U.S market for an extra 20 months thus protecting 12 billion in sales to Pfizer. The aforementioned settlement also allows Ranbaxy to sell the generic drug on various dates in seven other countries including Canada, Australia and Germany.
Pfizer and Ranbaxy also agreed that Ranbaxy will stop contesting the validity of Pfizer patents in several specified
The U.S. District Court in Delaware rejected Israeli generic drug company Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. request to sell a generic version of Procter & Gamble's drug Actonel . The ruling is part of a patent infringement lawsuit filed against Teva in 2004.
Teva's claimed that Procter & Gamble's patent for the drug was not valid due to the obviousness of the invention.
Procter & Gamble's patent for risedronate (US5583122), the active ingredient in Actonel ,will remain valid until 2013. Actonel was approved in 2000 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the prevention and treatment
In a recent decision, the Israeli Trademark Office ruled that the term "Once Weekly" cannot be registered as a trademark which relates to a drug, as it is descriptive.
The proceeding was an appeal on the trademark examiner´s decision that "Once Weekly" is a descriptive term, and therefore, did not allow it to be registered as a trademark.
The applicant
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