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PATENTS

European patent protection for medical uses of known products and drug repurposing

Nature Biotechnology volume 40, pages 465–471 (2022)Cite this article

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Obtaining European patent protection for medical uses of known products is not a key factor limiting repurposing activity.

Drug repurposing is a strategy for identifying new uses of approved or investigational drugs that are outside the scope of the original medical indications1. Finding new therapeutic uses for existing medicines holds significant potential, as it is often faster to develop a drug for a new use if it is already known to be safe and well tolerated by the human body. Repurposing de-risked compounds with previously known therapeutic effects is also an attractive drug development strategy because it can potentially reduce overall drug development costs and shorten timelines to market introduction2. If it is successful, the public at large benefits from the repurposing of ‘old’ drugs (known products) to treat more common and rare diseases.

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Fig. 1: EPO medical use patents with independent claims directed to medical uses of known products from 2001 to 2021, plotted by publication date of the patent grant (Search ID: S3).
Fig. 2: Organizations with the highest count of patents with EPO medical use independent claims (S3) and organizations owning medical use patents with family country counts of at least 20 jurisdictions (S8) in the last 20 years.
Fig. 3: Jurisdictions where patents in the same simple patent family as S8 are protected (the collection of patent documents considered to cover the same invention and all having exactly the same priorities as the S8 EPO medical use patent).
Fig. 4: Number of EPO medical use patents by Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) class.
Fig. 5: Results of expert review manual classification of medical use patents based on the disease claimed on the 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, Matthew Jordan, Cristina Crespo & Johnathon Liddicoat

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  1. Mateo Aboy
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  2. Kathleen Liddell
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  3. Matthew Jordan
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  4. Cristina Crespo
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  5. Johnathon Liddicoat
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Correspondence to Mateo Aboy.

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Aboy, M., Liddell, K., Jordan, M. et al. European patent protection for medical uses of known products and drug repurposing. Nat Biotechnol 40, 465–471 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-022-01269-3

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