06
Intensify dialogue on IPR in health care
Intellectual property Regulations
Ensure intellectual property protection and proper implementation Protecting intellectual property is key when building an innovation-driven economy. And for a large proportion of health care companies, intellectual property rights (IPR) are the foundation of their business models. They ensure that developers and manufactures have an incentive to invest the significant resources required to develop innovative products. To ensure sufficient incentives for these risky investments, patents provide a time-limited right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention. This is particularly critical for sectors with long innovation cycles that require large and risky investments. In some cases, such as in the pharmaceutical sector, these cycles normally take eight to twelve years110. According to some sources, drug 110
32
Bundesverband der Pharmazeutischen Industrie, Pharma-Daten 2019, 11.2019, p. 13, <https://www.bpi.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Downloads/Publikationen/ Pharma-Daten/Pharma-Daten_2019_DE.pdf>.
R&D across all therapeutic areas takes on average even 14 years.111 In addition, patent rights are granted for 20 years, beginning at the time the application is filed. Given that filing a patent is required in the earliest days of discovery, the term of protection during which the product can be marketed for pharmaceuticals is often less than half of the total patent term. If that is not the case, for example, supplemental protection certificates or similar mechanisms compensate for some time. Furthermore, although IP protection is for a limited time period, the benefits are long term, and the goal of patent law is to transfer innovation to the public by making the details of patented inventions broadly available. It does so by requiring a patent application to contain information that is sufficient to enable any â&#x20AC;&#x153;person skilled in the technological area to which the invention pertains
111
Paul SM, et al. How to improve R&D productivity: the pharmaceutical industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grand challenge. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. 19.02.2010, p. 6., <https:// www.nature.com/articles/nrd3078> (accessed 23.07.2020).
