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news.The House of Lords's unanimous decision to validate Angiotech patent has raised the pharma industry's spirits as the pharma firms now have reason to believe that they can get easier access to patent protection in the UK, reported PharmaTimes.
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The patent at issue was granted to Angiotech Pharmaceuticals by the European Patent Office on June 25, 1997. However, five different companies opposed the patent and the UK trial court and the UK Court of Appeal decided that the patent was invalid in view of several publications.
But within the same time frame several courts in the Netherlands, concluded that Angiotech’s claimed invention was inventive and not obvious in view of the same publications. Angiotech appealed the UK lower court decisions to the House of Lords seeking to resolve these inconsistent outcomes.
The House of Lords did not agree with the reasoning that the UK lower courts used in justifying revocation and upheld the validity of Angiotech’s patent.
The House of Lords’s unanimous decision is said to reflect an important development in bringing uniformity to the interpretation of the European Patent Convention among the national courts of Europe and the European Patent Office.