Patent Search for Medicines

Introduction

When a pharmaceutical company successfully develops a new drug, the drug is initially covered under patent protection, which means that only the pharmaceutical company is allowed to manufacture, market the drug and eventually make profit from it. Once the patent has expired, the drug can only then be manufactured and sold by other companies as generic drug.

Have you ever wondered how long more before a drug will finish patent and generic drugs will be available? If yes, where can we find this information?



From Medicine to Patent Status

There are few FREE websites through which we can find out patent status.

  • Patent Register from Health Canada
    • For patents of drugs registered in Canada
  • Medspal
    • Provides information on the patent and licensing status of selected HIV, hepatitis C, tuberculosis and other patented medicines in low- and middle-income countries
  • Orange Book
    • For patents of approved drug products marketed in US.
    • Click till "Patent and Exclusively Information" to check patent number and expiration.
  • Pat-INFORMED
    • It is a voluntary listing of INN (International Nonproprietary Name) by the pharmaceutical companies.



Identifying Malaysian Patent

Using US/Canadian Patent Number (from Orange Book and Health Canada) in any of the following websites will help to identify the Malaysian Patent Number.

  • Espacenet
    • Provides free access to over 120 million patent documents.
    • Malaysian Patent Number can be found under "published as MY" under bibliographic data.
  • Google Patents
    • Patent numbers can be found under worldwide application
  • World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
    • Access the Patentscope database.
    • Malaysia patent number can be found under Related patent documents of National Biblio. Data.
Next, you can then type the title obtained from Espacenet or Google Patents or Patentscope to MyIPO to identify Malaysian patent application.



Some Thoughts

As a pharmacist, I find it is reasonable to expect us to be able to find out when a drug patent is going to expire at Malaysia (the drug patent expiration could be different across countries). However, there are so many restrictions and troubles that we have to overcome to get to the answer (especially when there is lack of a free, user-friendly website which summarises the approved patents of medicines at Malaysia). A more practical approach will be we know the medicine patency expired when generic drug enters the market.



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