The “core inventive advance” of the basic patent has no relevance for Article 3(a) of the SPC Regulation
With the rendering of the judgment in Royalty Pharma (C-650/17) by the Court of Justice of the European Union today on 30 April 2020, a series of referrals relating to the interpretation of Article 3(a) of the SPC Regulation, which requires that the product of an SPC must be “protected” by the basic patent, finally comes to a close.
The interpretation of Article 3(a) was only recently scrutinized in the CJEU’s decision in Teva v. Gilead (C-121/17) of 25 July 2018, which is the first SPC judgment rendered by the Grand Chamber of the CJEU and was presumably meant to set a definitive standard for the assessment of the highly contentious Article 3(a) requirement. While, unsurprisingly, the test endorsed by the CJEU in Teva v. Gilead has now been confirmed in Royalty Pharma, the CJEU has taken this opportunity to provide welcome clarification on important details.
The complete Kluwer Patent Blog article can be downloaded under: http://patentblog.kluweriplaw.com/2020/04/30/cjeu-clarifies-the-conditions-for-spc-grant-in-royalty-pharma-c-650-17-the-core-inventive-advance-of-the-basic-patent-has-no-relevance-for-article-3a-of-the-spc-regulation/ (Oswin Ridderbusch, Alexa von Uexküll, both partners at Vossius & Partner)
The Royalty Pharma Collection Trust was represented by Dr Dirk Bühler, Dr Marco Stief and Dr Annelie Wünsche in Case C 650/17 with the German Patent and Trademark Office concerning its refusal to grant a supplementary protection certificate for sitagliptin for the treatment of diabetes mellitus.
