Patent Law

From today's (March 21, 2008) The Indian Express, comes this editorial:

From January 2005, a new law was to have brought India into compliance with the WTO on how pharmaceutical products were to be patented. Earlier, patent protection was offered on the process; now the product itself was sought to be protected by patent. This meant that a drug could no longer be reverse engineered and marketed. However, as a case that came in for an interim order in the Delhi high court on Wednesday shows, the new patent regime still has many grey zones which need to be addressed before the public policy implications can be adequately assessed. The court refused to stay drug-maker Cipla from manufacturing and selling a lung cancer formulation which the Swiss company, Roche, says is being done in violation of its patent. The case comes in for hearing again in August. Positions have predictably been taken by activists and pharma players, but the issues raised go beyond the specifics of the Cipla/Roche case.

Read the full editorial here.