Pharmaceutical Law and Patent Law

The patent law and pharma laws and regulations need to be coordinated. The interpretative proposal of the author is that a patent claim aiming at protecting the invention as a medicinal product must necessarily be expressed using the appropriate terms provided for by the laws and regulations concerning the industrial medicinal product, such as “medicinal product” and “active substance”; otherwise the patent may not be considered as covering a “medicinal product” or an “active substance”. Moreover, as a consequence, the presentation of a product in a patent claim as a medicinal product or an active substance implies that the enforceability of such claim is conditioned upon the demonstration of the efficacy and safety of the product through the preparation and approval by the competent authorities of a dossier of pharmacological and clinical trials. The legal system taken into consideration by the author is the European one, but the interpretative proposal is, mutatis mutandis, applicable to other systems of law.