The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) had plans to implement changes to their patent procedures but GlaxoSmithKline Plc's (NYSE:GSK) successfully managed to get the US District Court for the Eastern District Court of Virginia to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the changes.
Under the present system, companies submit their patent application as soon as possible after the discovery of a potential new drug in order to stake their intellectual property claim. Normally the initial applications and contain very little information but as more information becomes available the companies file continuations and add in the new information, called claims. All the changes must be reviewed by the patent office and currently there is no limit to the number of continuations and claims that companies can submit.
However, the patent office wanted the changes to include that a company may only file up to two continuations with no more than 25 claims. Any more than that and they would be required to petition the PTO, and pay extra fees providing that "the amendment, argument or evidence sought to be entered could not have been submitted during the prosecution of the prior-filed application."
The changes were to relives the workload on the overburdened PTO which claims that the review process taking approximately 32 months and it already has a backlog of over 760,000 applications.
Due tot he injunction the planned changes are now on hold "until further notice" according to the PTO.
[Source: DrugSearcher]
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