Pharma Patent Litigation Highlights In Southeast Asia In Early 2020s

As Southeast Asia grows as a manufacturing base and sales market for pharmaceuticals, it is becoming more important for life sciences IP professionals to factor the region into their strategies and to monitor important legal developments across its numerous national jurisdictions. Below is a guide to the most important patent-related decisions to be issued by Southeast Asian courts so far in the 2020s.

Singapore

The patent linkage provisions enacted following the Free Trade Agreement with the US on 1 January 2004 sparked two rounds of patent litigation concerning the cancer drug bortezomib. This series of cases stretched began in 2019 and concluded in 2023. Under the patent linkage system, an applicant for marketing authorization needs to disclose third-party patents that are related to a drug for which marketing authorization is applied.