Pharma, Pharmaceutics and Biotechnology Conference

Drug patents are said to be the lifeline of the pharmaceutical industry, that is, their mainstay as sources of legal protection for inventions and encouragement of innovation in the development of drugs.

Conversely, on the other hand, finding a balance in intellectual property protection against access has proven a quite trying test. Topics to be covered include drug patents and their implications for pharmaceutical innovation, public health, and cross-border access to treatment.

For example, a patent for a drug provides the years by which the owner shall be allowed to make, sell, and issue the pharmaceutical product. This is usually 20 years from the time of filing.

This session will introduce key concepts of patent law: what qualifies a development as patentable, what a patent office does, and the process for patent application. Participants will understand how patents motivate pharmaceutical research and development.

A company can recoup their investment costs because of this patent. Drug patents go a long way in encouraging innovation in the pharma sector. Patent protection can stimulate investment in research and development since knowledge generated by such studies enables finding new treatments for various diseases.

In this session, participants will learn through the case study of successful drug development that has resulted from patent protection and the implication that future innovation in the area holds. Incentivizing creativity through patents on drugs, they increase the barriers to access and affordable medicines, particularly in poor and middle-income countries.

This session will review patent exclusivity challenges that hinder increasing public health engagement with high drug prices, and participants will discuss improving access to essential medicines in light of generic drugs, patent pools, and international agreements, including TRIPS.

Patent litigation is a prime factor of the pharmaceutical industry, more often presenting intricate legal battles over the issues of validity and infringement of patents.

So, this session will cover the basics of patent litigation to understand the role of courts, patent holders, generic manufacturers, other recent trends in patent law about challenges towards patent validity, and efforts on patent reforms to balance the polices of innovation and access.

Finally, future trends in drug patents under biotechnology advancement, personalized medicine, and global health initiative will form the culmination of this session.

Emerging trends in patent law will be advanced, with respect to uses by artificial intelligence and digital health technologies in drug development.

Its existence also raises the stakeholder relationship between government, healthcare providers, and the pharmaceutical industry to ensure that innovation meets its requirement of a very pervasive public health need.