Filing a Provisional Patent in California: Your Complete Guide
November 11, 2024
Intellectual property rights are important for biotech companies to protect patent and trademarks for global business growth. Biotech patent attorneys work with clients to ensure biotechnology based innovations secure patent rights worldwide and trademark lawyers ensure the corresponding brand names establish the product’s identity worldwide.
The protection of any technology is important. Patent law is applied on an innovation by granting the holder of a valid patent a temporary monopoly on the invention and enabling the patent owner to charge competitive prices. It is basically applied on the areas of society, drugs, and technology; broad legal prohibitions which exists to protect the life of human beings. If any pharmaceutical company develops their new drug for the prevention of a disease condition, it is primarily sold under a brand name, which clinicians can prescribe for use. Under patent protection, only the pharmaceutical company that holds the patent is allowed to manufacture, market and make profit from the drug. Biologics is a new field of research that has many favourable possibilities to be used as therapeutics for many conditions.
Both drugs and biologics are used in prevention, diagnosis, cure and mitigation of human diseases and also in various treatment propositions. Biologics are molecules that derived from living organisms. In use, Biologics possess large and complex structures. Practically, both drugs and biologics are subject to premarket approval process licence by Food and Drug Administration under the Public Health Service Act (PHSA).
Patent rights allow the patent owner to exclude others from making, using, selling or importing an invention without the consent of the patentee. The inventor and patent applicants can use “patent pending” for their products and marketing materials after an application of patent is filed. The patent system was designed to promote balance between new drug invention and generic drug competition. The period of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the country. Patents can be obtained for any unique, new and useful inventions made by humans. For example, there are many different aspects of new pharmaceutical products, including, its active ingredients, formulations, methods, technologies to manufacture drugs and biologics which can be patented.
Protecting biologics by way of patents is challenging because it is complex in its structure with complicated manufacturing processes. In coming years, it is expected that the rules and regulations will become less ambiguous, as court cases defining their interpretations play out. There are still changes in maintaining the intellectual property protection of biologics due to the high cost involved in obtaining and maintain them. Patent application and maintenance involves payment of various official fees and attorney fees for drafting the patent application.
A valuable patent portfolio takes time for creation and companies focus on advanced patent analytics for decision making process. During early stages of patent process, patent analysts focus on keyword based patent searches in combination with classification codes to derive most relevant search results. Patent attorneys work strategically to compare strengths of patents owned by the competitors along with patent citation analysis. In the long run, patents act as key tools for biotech and pharma business owners to ensure the benefits of innovation by way of both direct and indirect income streams.
Companies establish a vision and patent strategy by way of provisional patent applications. Usage and analysis of patents during the initial stages of patent filing process results in inter-department sync. It is a proven fact that connecting patent filing with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) generates large number of innovations with a high degree of potential benefits.
