Federal Court Sides With GlaxoSmithKline, Strikes Down Rules Issued by Patent Office

The USPTO’s proposed rule changes, struck down in this important Glaxo federal court decision, would have added significant burdens to pharmaceutical companies in developing their IP portfolios and ultimately their drug treatments.   The proposed changes were seemingly motivated to make the patent application process run better by creating leaner applications and limiting continuations....

The USPTO is facing an epidemic amount of frivolous patents.  This degrades their ability to review strong and potentially important patents in a timely manner.  Although this particular change was struck down in Federal court, industry leaders need to work with the USPTO in order to strengthen the US patent system.   

The proposed PTO rules, while logical on the surface, suffer from the all too common defect of over-generalization. In patent applications, as in so many other fields, there is usually not a one size fits all approach.

It often takes several attempts to finalize the Patent Claims and language to satify the examiner.  The limitation of such attempt would place an undue burden on companies and would certainly result in loss of coverage of Intellectual Property (IP). Loss of IP results in reduction of a company desire to commercialize a new pharmaceutical product.  The costs associated with such a launched...