PATENTS IN PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY Avan Oktabrian Buchori avanoktabrian24@gmail.com
Patents is a kind form of Intellectual Property that gives its owner an legal right to exclude others from making, selling or using an invention, for a limited period of years. But in exchange, the Patents holder have to publish their own invention after the limited period of the patent is run out. One of the patents regulation is regulated under World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). And all of the WTO Member should have a regulation related to Patents. TRIPS Agreement introduced the Law of Intellectual Property Rights in the International Trade Policies. Until 2020, TRIPS Agreement is still an agreement who gives a complete and comprehensive regulation to the Intellectual Property Rights. One of the activities of Pharmaceutical Industry is a Drug research and Development (R&D), R&D is a high risk investment for the pharmaceutical industry. That is why, Patents should be there for protect the “invention” of the Pharmaceutical Industry. Patents also have a function to help companies to recover the costs spent in discovering its invention. The Paris Convention of 1883 established of the International Union for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1884. This convention has given an important development in international patenting that ensured equal treatment of inventors. Furthermore, the establishment of the European Patent Convention in 1977 allowed a single patent application to be filed for European Countries at the European Patent Office (EPO). The approved applications were validated by other member countries of EPO, which meant that this was essential for a system of filling a “bundle” of national patents. Then, The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) was soon established in 1985, and this treaty allowed nationals or residents of 145 contracting signatory countries to file a single international application at their local patent office. A standardized application and a single search by an International Search Authority (ESA) reduced the costs for filing. Pharmaceutical Industry has been and still is an industry that largely serves developed countries. United States is occurred the 82% of R&D Activities in the world due to the lack of price controls that enabled them to exploit Market power which was more difficult to do elsewhere, including Europe. United States dominances the R&D Investments lasted for about a decade from 1995 until 2005. But, the dominance of R&D Investment by United States is decreased because of the increasing competition from emerging countries, such as Brazil, China and India. R&D Investments is only give a little fractions of the Gross Domestic Product for most countries, While the OECD countries reported in the World Bank World Development Indicators(WDI) in 2013 is seemingly at 2,4%.