Pharmaceutical companies need to do a good job in patent warfare

Patent is the most dazzling aura of the product. Especially in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, patents can help companies monopolize the market, obtain individual pricing power and high profits. Therefore, protection of patent rights is regarded by companies as life.

In the past more than 100 years, patent litigation has been accompanied by the growth of all emerging industries – from steam engines and semiconductors to communications and medical devices. Some influential patent rights cases may even have a profound effect on the industrial structure.

More than 20 years ago, Mindray Shenzhen was short-listed by Shenzhen Anke to court. Anko's reason is that Mindray's fetal monitor has misappropriated its patented technology. As the evidence is conclusive, Mindray was awarded compensation for Anke's 300,000 yuan and banned the production of fetal monitors.

Twenty years later, Shenzhen Mindray, which has become the leading company in domestic surveillance products, has once again taken to court. However, this time their role was the plaintiff. In April 2011, Mindray filed a lawsuit with the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court, saying that various types of patient monitors and ultrasound imaging equipment produced by Ricardo infringed its patent rights. Chief Executive Xu Hang of the MIDRAY publicly responded to the Libang infringement case: “Midui invested 100 million yuan in R&D every year and never allowed others to infringe on our intellectual property rights.” In June 2012, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court ruled that Libang was not Mindray agreed that the manufacture, sale, and promise of sales of alleged infringing products for business purposes constitute an infringement of the plaintiff’s patent rights, and must immediately stop the infringement, destroy stock-infringing products, and compensate Mindray’s economic loss of 1 million yuan.

In the field of medicine, R&D of patented technologies and products has a large investment, a long period of time, and a high risk. The future market growth of the product is difficult to determine. According to the survey, many well-known multinational pharmaceutical and medical device companies’ autonomous R&D projects accounted for only 1/3 of all their research projects, and most of them rely on the introduction. In order to control the progress of R&D, some multinational companies will also have the intention to implement patent strategies—acquisition of inventions and patents of other companies. They will either technically shelve the technology or delay the development of the project so that it will not be able to obtain a patent license in due course. These potential competitors are crushed in the cradle. At the same time, they will advance the development of their own projects.

In fact, high-tech and high-value-added industries such as communications and medical equipment are still "rich clubs" where transnational giants dominate. Without sufficient patents, core intellectual property rights, and technology as a backstop, it is difficult for the average-scale enterprise to “come into battle” to compete. Moreover, only when the company has patented technologies and products upstream, its patent protection effectiveness is stronger; if the patented technologies and products developed by the company are on the downstream, then the patents they obtain can only control relatively small areas.

Faced with patent warfare, companies lacking sufficient IPR reserves may be “outside” earlier. In addition to increasing research and development investment in patented technologies and products, enterprises should also learn a foreign company's practice of "warming up and warming up" in the patent warfare - strengthen cooperation, form a technology alliance, establish a "patent pool," and do a good job for patent wars as soon as possible. ready.