SPCs: first applications in France of CJEU Royalty Pharma test
Out-Law News | 17 Feb 2021 | 11:40 am | 7 min. read
In three recent rulings, the Paris Court of Appeal has highlighted the challenges pharmaceutical manufacturers can face in obtaining supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) for monoclonal antibodies on the basis of patents which disclose their function but not their structure, experts in intellectual property law have said.
Monoclonal antibodies are biologic drugs that act like the human antibodies in the human immune system. They are used in immunotherapy to bind to specific cells or proteins, for instance to inhibit their activity.
When a new monoclonal antibody therapy is discovered, it is typically first protected by a patent family covering a function rather than a specific antibody – for instance, the use of a monoclonal antibody to inhibit a specific protein found to play a role in protecting cancer cells from the body s immune system attack