Evergreening of patents

Another IPR topic!

Evergreening of patents refers to increasing the life of the patent or the patent term beyond 20 years to reap the benefits for much longer period of time. Drug patent ever greening is the single most important strategy that multinational pharmaceutical companies have been using since 1983 in the US (and since 1993 in Canada) to retain profits from “blockbuster” (high sales volume) drugs for as long as possible.
When the original patent over the active component of a brand name drug is about to expire, these drug companies often claim large numbers of complex and highly speculative patents. Laws in the US and Canada require manufacturers to notify the original brand name patent holders of their intention to market copies at the expiry of the original patent. The original patent holders can then threaten these potential generic competitors with breaching their now “evergreened” patents and seek a court order preventing their marketing approval.
The ultimate consequence could be the generic equivalents of the drug will be prohibited from entering the market so the price of the drug of Innovator Company will be higher even after the patent expiry in absence of competition from generic drug makers.
One form of evergreening occurs when the original manufacturer “stockpiles” patent protection by obtaining separate 20 year patents on multiple attributes of a single product. Many other evergreening strategies exist. Evergreening, in one common form, occurs when the brand-name manufacturer literally “stockpiles” patent protection by obtaining separate 20 year patents on multiple attributes of a single product. These patents can cover everything from aspects of the manufacturing process to tablet colour, or even a chemical produced by the body when the drug is ingested and metabolised by the patient.

Further reading on the topic can be obtained from: http://www.who.int/intellectualproperty/submissions/US%20FTAs%20and%20th...