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PATENTS

Mapping the European patent landscape for medical uses of known products

Nature Biotechnology volume 39, pages 1336–1343 (2021)Cite this article

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European Patent Office data show an increasing number of patents for new medical uses of known products.

Most countries active in pharmaceutical innovation provide some sort of patent protection for new medical uses of known products. This provides market exclusivity when, for example, investigators find a new, non-obvious medical indication for a drug that was previously patented as a new, non-obvious molecule. Yet, despite the clear policy importance of developing new treatments quickly and cheaply, surprisingly little is known about the scale and impact of these patents.

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Fig. 1: EPO patent applications and granted patent publications with claims directed to medical uses of known products (EPC2000 claims) from 2001 to 2020 by publication date of the patent application (S7 in Table 1).
Fig. 2: Granted patents with EPC2000 claims per year.
Fig. 3: Organizations with the highest counts of patents (S8) with EPC2000 claims since 1990.
Fig. 4: Organizations leading the inventive patent activity in 2020 (original applicants/assignees) resulting in granted patents with independent EPC2000 claims.
Fig. 5: Granted patents with EPC2000 claims and estimate (upper and lower bounds) for the number of patents whose broadest claim is an EPC2000 claim.
Fig. 6: Types of claim formulations that are being used to protect inventions that claim medical uses of known products (compositions/compounds) and their relative prevalence.
Fig. 7: Priority dates of EPO patents containing Swiss-type claims.
Fig. 8: Classification of patents according to their broadest independent claim.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported, in part, by a Novo Nordisk Foundation grant for a scientifically independent Collaborative Research Programme in Biomedical Innovation Law (grant no. NNF17SA027784).

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  1. Centre for Law, Medicine, and Life Sciences (LML), Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Mateo Aboy, Kathleen Liddell, Johnathon Liddicoat, Cristina Crespo & Matthew Jordan

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Correspondence to Mateo Aboy.

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Aboy, M., Liddell, K., Liddicoat, J. et al. Mapping the European patent landscape for medical uses of known products. Nat Biotechnol 39, 1336–1343 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-01104-1

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