Insights

Last month, we reported on the curious case of lower-league football team Dulwich Hamlet Football Club and the somewhat bizarre decision of its landlord to register the club’s name as a trade mark and then demand that the club stop using it. The main takeaway message was the importance of obtaining registered trade mark protection. In that particular case, had Dulwich Hamlet itself secured registered protection for its name, it would have been relatively easy for it to prevent someone else registering it.

It was a privilege to attend the 5th Annual Peptides Congress in London yesterday and interact with so many experts in this field. Here are some of my highlights:

Today we are exhibiting at the 5th Biennial Biosimilars and Biobetters Congress in London.
It is great to be part of an event that focuses on the key areas of the industry including market access strategies, commercialisation, clinical development, bio-analytics and manufacturing.

I’m really looking forward to next week’s Biosimilars and Biobetters Congress in London. The organisers have put together a high-powered team of speakers (from Amgen, Abbvie, Pfizer, Novartis and others) – it should be a very stimulating event.

Following the release of the annual statistics from the European Patent Office (EPO), the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has released its annual statistics detailing the filing of patent, trademark and design applications through the respective international systems.

Most often, the invention in a patent application is for early stage, sometimes speculative, research which is yet to be fully realised. The process, from an initial idea captured in a patent application to a product being sold, may take many years.

Antibody technology has advanced a long way since the early days of Kohler & Milstein’s antibody-secreting murine hybridomas. Whilst Kohler & Milstein’s invention was not patented, patent protection for the new generation of murine, chimeric, humanized and human antibody-based drugs is essential to safeguard the future development of these drugs.

Most countries have patent laws which prohibit − directly or indirectly − the patenting of immoral inventions. However, the concept of morality is difficult to define: attitudes to morality vary widely between different countries and different religions, and they also change over time.

Every now and then a story pops up in the papers in which a large company is accused of using its trade mark rights to bully a smaller entity. The most recent example involves the well-known chicken restaurant chain, Nando’s, which has sought to assert its trade mark rights against an independent chicken restaurant going by the name of Fernando’s.

In today’s world, unless you are living in the middle of the Sahara Desert or somewhere equally remote, it is impossible to avoid trade marks. For most of us, whether we realise it or not, exposure to trade marks is pretty much continual from the moment we get up in the morning to the moment we go to bed.