Intellectual Property Involving Pharmaceuticals

Intellectural Property Rights with Pharmaceutical Companies

Competition is heavy in the Pharmaceutical arena, with billions of dollars at stake. Pharmaceutical companies fight for a higher share of the market through marketing campaigns, competition for employees, regulatory struggles, and research and development (R&D) programs, to name a few battlegrounds.

In the latter, the R&D field, pharmaceutical companies are racing to be the first to develop solid Intellectual Property rights in the next best application of breakthrough technology. They hope to patent their discovery without involving any other Pharmaceutical companies’ previous breakthroughs. This can be tricky, especially when there are only a handful of experts in the world applying their expertise to solving a particular problem. Also, the breakthroughs take many years to develop, and even a small improvement can mean a huge payoff.

These experts may work for universities, national laboratories, their own small companies, or one or more of the large Pharmaceutical companies, or maybe all of the above, at different stages of their careers.

Many times one expert’s work builds on another’s. This often causes Intellectual Property rights disputes, with very fuzzy lines defining where one party’s Intellectual Property rights start and another’s end. This dilemma is partially caused by mixed funding of R&D, since Intellectual Property rights in the resulting technology usually follow the money that supported the R&D.

High-powered law firms representing Pharmaceutical companies in Intellectual Property disputes are looking for better ways to solve disputes over who owns the Intellectual Property in new technological breakthroughs. Resorting to litigation takes too long in such a dynamic market, and parties run the risk of too much disclosure of their competitive edge in the process.

Billions of dollars can go down the drain while the parties laboriously prepare and wait for trial. All for the chance to plead their case before a Judge who may not know much about Intellectual Property rights or technology development. It can be very difficult to prepare a sophisticated technical and legal case for a jury.

Intellectual Property counsel are now turning to Arbitration of their clients’ disputes before Arbitrators pre-qualified to hear Intellectual Property cases, preferably also with a background in pharmaceuticals, or at least familiarity with technology development. Arbitration can be crafted to specifically meet the needs of the parties and will always save time and money.

For further information about Arbitration of Pharmaceutical and Intellectual Property cases see: TechnologyArbitration.com.