On October 24, 2024, the fifteenth session of the Intellectual Property Advisory Center for exporters is held
The applicant for the invention application will have to try to prove that the new field of application of the drug is sufficiently remote from the previous one and, therefore, it can be considered that we are talking about a completely different task.
A representative of a medical company asked about the possibility of obtaining a patent for a medicine for the treatment of cancer. At the same time, according to the consultant, he discovered the possibility of using another medicine for this purpose, intended for the treatment of a completely different disease, and in animals.
Realizing the importance of the problem, the entire consultation was switched by the consultant to a closed question response mode.
The following is only a part of the answer and general information.
In accordance with paragraph 1 of Article 2 of the Law of the Republic of Belarus "On Patents for Inventions, Utility Models, Industrial Designs", an invention that is granted legal protection is recognized as a technical solution in any field related to a product or method, as well as to the use of a product or method for a specific purpose and satisfying the following conditions of patentability: novelty, inventive level and industrial applicability. For the purposes of this Law, a product means an object as a result of human labor (in particular, a device, substance, strain of a microorganism, cell culture of plants or animals), a method is a process, technique or method of performing interrelated actions on a material object (objects) using material means.
Thus, it is possible to file an application for a medicinal product, while using the legal mechanism for using a known product for a new purpose.
There are not so many patents "for use" in the world. Application as a type of invention is theoretically possible for objects-methods, substances-compositions, devices, but it is especially typical for chemical compounds, which is a medicinal product, since a chemical compound is by its nature a multifunctional object. It seems that we are dealing with an invention for transfer, that is, with an already known, previously described function of matter, adapted to solve a problem in a different field, or, in other words, to perform a different task. The applicant will have to try to prove that the new field of application is sufficiently removed from the previous one and, therefore, it can be considered that we are talking about a completely different task.
