Life Sciences and Intellectual Property : Law and Practice by Bird & Bird LLP – Edition 2022

Description

This book arose out of a conversation in April 2018 with Stephen Wallace of Thomson Reuters, during which I wholeheartedly agreed with him that there was most definitely a gap in the market for a book covering life sciences and intellectual property, and further, that Bird & Bird should most definitely write it. For some reason, I failed to see the follow-up question coming and so could not quickly enough think of a reason why I should not be the person within Bird & Bird to write it. Having said that, I am now extremely glad that I did write it (time is a great healer!). This has been an extraordinary time to write a book such as this, with the three UK Supreme Court decisions in Actavis v Eli Lilly, Warner-Lambert v Generics and Actavis v ICOS having shaken up patent law to varying degrees. The wider implications of the new doctrine of equivalents introduced in Actavis v Eli Lilly has been a particularly fruitful source of material. I very much look forward to seeing how this area of law develops over the coming years. A significant chunk of this book deals with patent law issues, although the aim of this book is not to be an exhaustive textbook on patent law or intellectual property; other books fulfil that brief admirably. Nor does this book give chapter and verse on regulatory issues in life sciences. Rather, I approached the exercise with the aim of producing something that would be a useful initial reference source for a practitioner in the life sciences field (either in-house in a pharma company, like many of my instructing clients, or in private practice like me). We life sciences legal practitioners operate in an unusual world involving an interplay between intellectual property law (mainly patents) and EU regulatory law, perhaps with a sprinkling of competition law thrown in. In this book, I have therefore attempted to give a high-level overview of the pharma regulatory framework, including supplementary protection certificates, a fairly detailed expose of UK patent law-including issues surrounding generic market entry-and quite detailed chapters covering competition law in life sciences and pharmaceutical trade marks. I hope the reader finds it useful.
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Table of Contents
Part I : Overview
Part II : Patents in Life Sciences
Part III : Intellectual Property and Regulatory Issues
Part IV : Other Intellectual Property Rights in Life Science
Part V : The Future of Life Sciences