Ben Appleton and Mohammed Khimji from patent and trade mark firm, Wilson Gunn, explore the complexities, as well as the possibilities, of obtaining patent protection in Europe for inventions relating to biomarkers.
Key highlights:
- Biomarkers are of crucial importance in the personalised medicine journey. They are measurable indicators of biological states and can indicate regular biological processes and pathogenic processes.
- A biomarker could be a specific molecule, gene, cell, enzyme, or protein and can be used for disease detection, diagnosis, monitoring and potential treatment identification.
- Useful diagnostic techniques may be patented based on methods of detecting biomarkers in tissue or bodily fluid samples taken from a patient (as opposed to being performed directly on the patient, which will generally not be patentable).
- A hurdle to overcome is the methods of treatment of the human are per se excluded from patentability in Europe and most other countries.
The COVID-19 pandemic drove home the importance of healthcare more than ever before, cementing the need to continually develop healthcare products and practices to better equip against new and unknown challenges we may face.