CPIP has published a new policy brief entitled An Unwise Move to Discriminate Against Pharmaceutical Patents: Responding to the UN’s Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Patent Examination.

The brief, written by CPIP Senior Scholar and UMKC Professor of Law Chris Holman, analyzes the UN’s recent Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Patent Examination, which are influential in the policy debates regarding the role of patented pharmaceuticals in public health. Professor Holman critically examines the Guidelines, pointing out that they “put a thumb on the scale in favor of generic medications” while failing to adequately consider “the development and incremental improvement of innovative pharmaceutical products.”

The Executive Summary is copied below:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Recently, United Nations agencies have encouraged countries to make it harder to get patents on pharmaceuticals. The primary vehicle for this policy has been the Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Patent Examination: Examining Pharmaceutical Patents from a Public Health Perspective (the “Guidelines”). The Guidelines advocate excluding entire categories of pharmaceutical inventions from patentability.

This new approach represents a departure from past patent policy. The patent system has long applied the same rules to everybody instead of discriminating against particular types of technologies or industries. Ordinarily, each invention is judged on its individual merits based on neutral and generally-applicable rules for patentability.

The aim of the Guidelines is to make medicines cheaper, which is a laudable goal, but the kind of goal that has long been kept out of patent examination for good reasons. If a government objects to the prices of a product or how a business behaves in the marketplace, it applies other laws after the patent is granted. But when governments interject politics and policy before a patent is granted, the patent system as a whole becomes unreliable and unpredictable. Businesses are reluctant to invest in unreliable property rights and in the markets that make them unreliable. They either stop investing in innovation or avoid the markets where their innovations are unprotected.

The Guidelines contend that many forms of pharmaceutical innovation are inherently routine and hence unpatentable by default. Consequently, they demand exceptional circumstances from pharmaceutical inventions not required in other fields. The Guidelines would also restrict patents on innovations that occur later during drug development, including after the initial launch of a product.

This Policy Brief provides an evidence-based review of the categories of pharmaceutical innovation addressed by the Guidelines and dismissed as undeserving of patents. These include “Markush claims,” selection patents, patents on different forms of the drug, prodrugs and metabolites, compositions, combinations, doses, and new medical uses. Many of these categories of inventions are rather technical, so the Policy Brief attempts to briefly illuminate what each is and why it matters to the process of discovering and bringing new drugs to patients.

Once each category is carefully explained and examined, one finds real innovations. As illustrated by the decisions surveyed in this Policy Brief, when courts delve deeply into the substance of these inventions, they are often struck by the unpredictability and difficulty inherent in pharmaceutical innovation. These innovations can provide new and beneficial ways to formulate, prepare, and deliver the drugs as well as different ways to use the drugs.

Considered in the abstract, it is easy to devalue the inventiveness of the categories of pharmaceutical innovation targeted by the Guidelines. However, it is hoped that this Policy Brief and the full-length version, In Defense of Secondary Pharmaceutical Patents: A Response to the UN’s Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Patent Examination, will provide some counterweight to balance some of the more radical, and in my view unwarranted, recommendations set forth in the Guidelines. The interested reader should consult the full-length article for an expanded explanation including examples and citations to primary sources.

To read the policy brief, please click here.