The Presidium of Intellectual Property Court upheld a decision for a major international pharmaceutical company cancelling a patent on a pharmaceutical composition of drospirenone/ethinylestradiol, as well as a drug on its basis. This means that the Court's Presidium has drawn a line under the long dispute, which broke out in the autumn of 2013 and eventually made its way through the trial and cassation courts.
The drospirenone/ethinylestradiol composition is used in Russia to make a number of drugs, such as combined oral contraceptive pills (COCPs), the best known of which are Yarina, Yaz, and Midiana.
Previously, in 2014, the IP Court ruled to cancel some of the patent's claims; in January 2015, however, the Presidium set the decision aside in its entirety and ordered a retrial. During the retrial, the Firm's litigators succeeded in demonstrating the invalidity of the patent as a whole, as was originally claimed. As a result, in April 2015 the Court granted the Firm's Client's claim in full and invalidated the challenged patent in its entirety. The patentee and Rospatent [Federal Service for Intellectual Property, Patents and Trademarks] appealed against the decision to the Presidium of the IP Court; all the arguments of the appeal were, however, rejected by the Court.
The engagement was carried out by the patent attorneys Konstantin Suvorov and Dmitry Markin of the intellectual property section.