This article was published on Law360, a website that reviews recent patent decisions. The link to it follows: http://www.law360.com/articles/621755/astrazeneca-s-kid-asthma-drug-patent-deemed-obvious.
A federal judge ruled that AstraZeneca's patent on a generic version of pediatric asthma medication, specifically the patent for sterilizing the drug was invalid as obvious. The judge, Renee Marie Bumb, entered a judgment of non infringement for the defendants ruling they had sufficiently shown there were multiple techniques for sterilization in prior art. While AstraZeneca had initially won an appeal of a non infringement ruling, a Federal Circuit reversed the ruling and remanded the the case, leaving the judge to rule that the patent's claims describe methods of sterilizing the drug that were obvious.
One of the reasons this caught my eye was the fact that we tend to forget the scientific processes behind biotechnology firms in examining patent law. I found it interesting to witness how the defendants managed to prove how there were other known techniques to prepare a sterilization for the drug and how the healthcare industry competes for these different patents to produce the basic medicine necessary for our society. Reading about this demonstrated to me how patents can go way beyond our traditional thoughts of technology and their impact they can have on the pharmaceutical care that we are exposed to.
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