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Outlines the importance of chemical patents as an information source, highlighting the area of structural information and some of the special characteristics of the generic (Markush) type of description. Summarizes important research at Sheffield University (United Kingdom) performed from 1979 to 1995 by a team led by Mike Lynch. (PEN)

Describes results of a survey of library and information studies programs in the United Kingdom that was conducted to determine what courses included information on patents. Teaching methods are discussed, the use of British Library publications is explored, and program changes are discussed. The survey questionnaire is appended. (two references) (LRW)

Describes a survey of 33 British, French, German, and U.S. abstract journals that examined their coverage of patent specifications. The standards for the identification of patent documents developed by the World Intellectual Property Organization are discussed, and an appendix provides a listing of the patent coverage by the country of each journal. (3 references) (CLB)

What accounts for the common perception that women have contributed little to advances in entrepreneurship and innovation in Britain during the early industrial era? This paper empirically examines the role of gender diversity in inventive activity during the first and second industrial revolutions. The analysis of systematic data on patents and unpatentable innovations uniquely enables an evaluation of women's creativity within both the market and nonmarket sectors. British women inventors were significantly more likely than men to focus on unpatentable innovations in consumer final goods and design‐oriented products that spanned art and technology, and on uncommercialized improvements within the household. Conventional approaches that fail to account for nonmarket activity and for such incremental changes in consumer goods and design innovations therefore significantly underestimate women's contributions to household welfare and overall economic progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in inventive processes raises numerous patent law issues, including whether AI can be an inventor under law and who owns the AI‐generated inventions. The UK Supreme Court decision in Thaler v Comptroller of Patents, Designs and Trademarks has provided an ultimate answer to this question: AI cannot be an inventor for the purposes of patent law. This note argues, first, that while such a human‐centric approach to inventorship might discourage the use and development of AI technologies with autonomous invention capabilities, it will help retain an active human involvement in technologically supported inventive processes and continuously foster human ingenuity. Second, despite the Court focusing on what patent law is and not on what the law should be, the decision will be influential in the ongoing discussions on the future of patent law and will make it more difficult to expand patent law to incorporate non‐human inventors. Third, the decision has opened, or revealed, the gaps in patent law that the emergence of AI technologies have created and for which new legal solutions will be needed, especially with relation to the ownership of AI‐assisted inventions and the validation of inventorship claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the question of whether an author has, under the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, a right to object to the complete destruction of their copyright work. Under s. 80 of the 1988 Act, the author has the right, referred to as the 'integrity right', to object to the derogatory treatment of their copyright work, but the question as to whether this is broad enough to cover the utter and complete destruction of the work has not yet been settled satisfactorily. This discussion addresses this shortfall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the trade-off between cost-saving and commitment to a non-exclusive license, we use a dataset of the patents endorsed license of right (LOR) in the UK from 2004 to 2022 and apply the propensity score matching (PSM) method to examine whether the LOR system's renewal fee reduction will introduce low-quality patents. The results suggest that the renewal fee reduction leads to an increase of 1.89 years to the average age of patents endorsed LOR. Furthermore, the LOR system has a limited attraction to high-quality patents for both institution-preference enterprises and institution-prudent enterprises. The findings are robust to several empirical checks. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1796, American physician Elisha Perkins patented "metallick Tractors" for the treatment of various ailments, particularly those associated with pain. They were subsequently rapidly and widely disseminated in the United States and Great Britain based on testimonials and deceptive marketing tactics. Dissemination was facilitated by endorsements from prominent physicians, politicians, and clergymen; quasi-theoretical, handwaving explanations of efficacy based on Galvani's then-current experiments; and the procedure's apparent safety and simplicity. However, blinded placebo-controlled trials in Great Britain using sham devices demonstrated that the therapy was ineffective. In response, in the period from 1798 to 1806, Perkinists unleashed a barrage of disinformation (ad hominem attacks, misleading arguments, unethical propaganda tactics, and poetic and graphic satire) to sway public opinion in favor of the fraudulent therapy and against its critics. The disinformation slowed the abandonment of "tractoration", but higher-level scientific argumentation ultimately prevailed. The Perkinist disinformation campaign had antecedents with the Mesmerist disinformation campaign in the mid-1780s. Similar propaganda tactics are still widely employed to encourage the purchase and use of disproven or fraudulent therapies, as evidenced by propaganda from adherents of acupuncture in response to negative clinical trials and from supporters of unsafe and ineffective therapies promulgated during COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Great Britain Supreme Court's decision on the patentability of inventions created by AI-powered machines. Topics include the definition of an inventor under the U.K. Patents Act 1977, the requirement for a patent applicant to be a natural person or a legal entity, and the conclusion that AI machines cannot be recognized as inventors under current patent law.

We model the spatial characteristics of technological knowledge flows in the UK. Using a novel and highly accurate dataset of inventor locations, we test for localisation of knowledge spillovers in citations between UK patent applications from 1982 to 2015. We apply continuous distance localisation tests separately to patent citations in 313 technologies and find that spillovers are localised in far fewer technologies and at shorter distances than previous studies have suggested. Only 30% of technologies in the UK display localisation, knowledge spillovers decay rapidly at distances between 30 and 80 km, and spillovers within technologies are twice as frequently localised as spillovers between technologies. Our results suggest that technological and geographical proximity are important determinants of knowledge spillovers in the UK and that close physical proximity is particularly relevant for industrial sectors that are more reliant on tacit knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation in the biotechnology field is influenced by various economic, social, and industrial factors, emphasizing the incorporation of more R&D investments to attain the required significant innovation outcomes. Therefore, within the context of complexities related to biotech innovation, this study aims to determine the impact of corruption control (COR), patent (PAT), government effectiveness (GE), political stability (PS) and rule of law (RL) on pharmaceutical revenue (REV) in UK. The integration of R&D employees (RNDEMP) and R&D expenditure (RNDEXP) is also observed in influencing the revenue. For this purpose, the required secondary quantitative data was obtained from the websites of related organizations from the period of 2005 to 2020. After the collection of data, "ordinary least square (OLS)" analysis was conducted to determine the association between the constructs of the study. The results obtained from this study showed that COR, PAT, PS, RL, PS and GE insignificantly impact the REV. At the same time, the impact of RNDEMP and RNDEXP was also found to be insignificant within the context of pharmaceutical revenue in UK. This study has also provided important implications to promote biotech innovation, focusing on R&D investments and other related factors in order to increase pharmaceutical revenue. This adds value to the current research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between innovation and skill premium is analysed on a panel of 12 countries for a 16-year span (2000–2015). According to a Schumpeterian view, a non-linear relationship between innovation and skill premium is found showing a threshold effect that reverses the relationship for relatively high levels of innovative activity. Moreover, the relationships change from convex to concave when variables representing different types of innovative activity are considered. In fact, with R&D a positive relationship with skill premium reverses once a threshold is exceeded, while the opposite holds for patents, for which the relationship is initially negative and then becomes positive. We argue that this is due to the different degrees of appropriability of the knowledge produced by innovators with these activities. We then show how to exploit these different patterns to provide a truly innovation-based analysis of the patterns of skill premium for the United States, France, Germany and Great Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of entrepreneurial university seeks to boost the transfer of academic knowledge to firms and foster socio-economic development. The main objective of this paper is to examine the various determinants that influence universities knowledge transfer activities. To fulfil this objective, we draw our dataset from the higher education and business survey (HESA-BCI) conducted across the United Kingdom in the 2017/18 academic year and the partial least square structural equation was used. The Results demonstrated that funding, patents, and rewards all have significant influence on universities spin off creation. The results also showed that patents played a significant mediating role towards universities spin off creation. Findings of this study contribute to validating the important factors that promotes entrepreneurial activities at universities as well as contributing to knowledge transfer activities. The findings have positive implications for researchers, academic entrepreneurs, and university management aiming to exploit and commercialise university knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the patterns of technology transfer from Britain to France during the early phases of industrializing using a dataset comprising all patents granted in France in the period 1791–1844. Exploiting the peculiarities of French legislation, we construct an array of patent quality indicators and investigate their determinants. We find that patents filed by British inventors or French inventors with personal connections to British inventors were of relatively higher quality. Overall, our results show that the French innovation system was capable of attracting and effectively absorbing key technologies from Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Despite decades of research, the relationship between intellectual property rights (IPRs) and foreign direct investment (FDI) remains ambiguous. Using a recently developed patent enforcement index (along with a broader IPR index) and a large sectoral country-to-country FDI dataset, the authors revisit the FDI-IPR relationship by testing the impact of IPRs on UK and US outward FDI (OFDI) flows as well as earnings from outward FDI (EOFDI). Design/methodology/approach: The authors use disaggregated data for up to 9 distinct sectors of economic activity from both the US and UK for OFDI flows and EOFDI, for a panel of up to 42 developed and developing countries over sample periods from 1998 to 2015. The authors employ a panel fixed effects (FE) approach that allows exploiting the longitudinal properties of the data using Driscoll and Kraay's (1998) nonparametric covariance matrix estimator. Findings: The authors do not find any consistent evidence in support of the hypothesis that countries' strength of IPR protection or enforcement affects inward FDI, or that sector of investment matters. The results prove robust to sensitivity checks that include an alternative broader measure of IPR strength, analyses across sub-samples disaggregated according to the strength of countries' IPRs as well as developing vs developed economies and an extended specification accounting for dynamic effects of the response of FDI to both previous investment levels and IPR (patent) protection. Originality/value: The authors make use of the largest most granular sectoral country-to-country FDI dataset employed to date in the analysis of the FDI-IPR nexus with disaggregated data for OFDI and EOFDI across up to 9 distinct sectors of economic activity from both the US and UK The authors employ a more sophisticated measure of IPR strength, the patent index proposed by Papageorgiadis et al. (2014), which places emphasis on the effectiveness of enforcement practices as perceived by managers, together with the overall administrative effectiveness and efficiency of the national patent system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities' decisions during technology transfer may affect affordability, accessibility, and availability of COVID-19 health technologies downstream. We investigated measures taken by the top 35 publicly funded UK universities to ensure global equitable access to COVID-19 health technologies between January and end of October 2020. We sent Freedom Of Information (FOI) requests and analysed universities' websites, to (i) assess institutional strategies on the patenting and licensing of COVID-19-related health technologies, (ii) identify all COVID-19-related health technologies licensed or patented and (iii) record whether universities engaged with the Open COVID pledge, COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), or Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) COVID-19 licensing guidelines during the time period assessed. Except for the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, UK universities did not update their institutional strategies during the first year of the pandemic. Nine universities licensed 22 COVID-19 health technologies. Imperial College London disclosed ten patents relevant to COVID-19. No UK universities participated in the Open COVID Pledge or C-TAP, but discussions were ongoing in autumn 2020. The University of Bristol endorsed the AUTM guidelines. Despite important COVID-19 health technologies being developed by UK universities, our findings suggest minimal engagement with measures that may promote equitable access downstream. We suggest universities review their technology transfer policies and implement global equitable access strategies for COVID-19 health technologies. We furthermore propose that public and charitable funders can play a larger role in encouraging universities to adopt such practices by making access and transparency clauses a mandatory condition for receiving public funds for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biological medicines are synthesised within living organisms utilising biotechnology processes, and include a number of manufactured insulins. Once the patents on these medicines expire, other manufacturers are able to replicate them, producing so-called biosimilars. Although the manufacturing and approval processes for these large molecules are more complicated than for smaller, generic drugs, biosimilars can, if proven to be equivalent to the original drugs in terms of efficacy and safety, offer cost savings. This article reviews the science behind biosimilar insulins and explains the rationale for their use, as well as providing practical advice on initiating or switching to these potentially cheaper drugs. A condensed summary of these practical points can be found here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to observe a patent application at the firm level, two conditions need to be met: new products need to be of patentable quality, which depends both on the degree of novelty of innovations and on the total number (portfolio) of innovations; and the benefits of patents need to be higher than the costs of owning them. Analyzing the patent propensity of small and large UK firms using a novel innovation-level survey (the SIPU survey) linked to Community Innovation Survey data, we find that when we consider the whole innovation portfolio, smaller firms do patent less than larger firms. However, using data on individual innovations, we find that smaller firms are no less likely to patent any specific innovation than larger firms. We argue that size differences in the probability to patent relate primarily to the "portfolio effect," i.e., larger firms generate more innovations than smaller firms, and therefore are more likely to create one or more which are patentable. As for the decision to patent a patentable innovation, we find that cost barriers, more than issues of innovation quality or enforceability, deter small firms from patenting specific innovations. Measures to address the costs of patenting for smaller—perhaps by considering patents as eligible costs for R&D tax credits—and/or subsidizing SMEs' participation in IP litigation schemes may both encourage patent use by smaller firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role interlocking directorships play in the patenting activities of UK companies and provide further insights into the channels through which this relationship emerges. We develop a theoretical model that identifies interlocking directorships as a mechanism for resolving property rights conflicts. Our empirical analysis suggests a strong relationship between interlocking and patenting behaviour and finds that interlocking leads to a higher number of successful patent applications, particularly for those firms located in technology-intensive industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse how patent thickets affect entry into patenting. A model of entry into patenting that allows for variation in technological opportunity, technological complexity and the extent of patent thickets is developed and analysed. Using UK data we then show that patent thickets are associated with a reduction of first time patenting in a technology controlling for the level of technological complexity and opportunity. Technologies characterized by more technological complexity and opportunity attract more entry into patenting. Our evidence indicates that patent thickets raise entry costs, which leads to less entry into technologies regardless of a firm's size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Calls for reform in child protection emphasize the need for parent participation. • The article distinguishes parental activism from parental participation. • Applying a political lens reveals how activism can drive transformative change. In light of calls for reform in child protection systems in various countries, including the UK, there has been a growing interest in involving parents who have lived experience of these systems at both the individual case and broader organizational levels. However, critics have argued that these activities are tokenistic and claimed they perpetuate the status quo. This article aims to conceptualize contemporary parental activism within the context of child protection in the UK, differentiating it from mere participation and exploring its potential to facilitate transformative change. Through a content and thematic analysis of in-depth qualitative interviews with parent activists (n = 28), we identified three key features of parental activism: embracing a critical consciousness and aspiring for change, challenging power and oppression, and developing community agency. By employing a political lens to examine various forms of activism, whether in collaboration with or independently of professional allies and systems, we argue that they enable opportunities for achieving transformative change to arise, leading to new, justice-based social arrangements and structures that enhance children's and families' welfare and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latest chapter of the litigation involving Neurim's second medical use patent relating to 'Circadin' (a prolonged-release formulation of melatonin), the Patents Court has held that Mylan—who had allegedly infringed Neurim's European patent ('EP702') and had counterclaimed for revocation of EP702 on grounds of invalidity unsuccessfully before the UK court but successfully in opposition proceedings before the European Patent Office—was not issue-estopped from challenging the validity in the UK court of Neurim's divisional patent ('EP443') with claims amended into a form 'patentably indistinct' from those of EP702. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mosquitoes are the vectors responsible for transmitting serious and life-threatening diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and lymphatic filariasis. Very few effective vaccines or drugs have been developed so far to prevent or treat these diseases, highlighting a need for vector control. This paper presents a comprehensive technology overview of patent documents disclosing biological agents for mosquito control. The patent analysis revealed that comparable number of patent documents were filed in two technology categories: non-recombinant agents and genetically modified (GM) agents. In the category of non-recombinant agents, toxic peptides from microbes and biological consortia seemed to be the earliest technology noted right from the year 1965 whereas the patent filings for suppression of mosquito population using genetic modification techniques have emerged from the year 2000 onwards. The United States of America is the leading patent filing jurisdiction followed by China and the Great Britain. Academic institutes have filed higher number of patent applications as compared to private companies. University of Florida was found to be the leading patent filing entity and its patents were focused on suppression of vector population using techniques such as release of insects with dominant lethal (RIDL) and RNA interference (RNAi). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual property rights are key to the translation of discoveries into clinical use in personalised medicine. This article explores the interaction of intellectual property rights, specifically patents, with the field of genomic personalised medicine, through empirical work investigating the role that patents play in the development and delivery of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT). Single gene testing (SGT) and NIPT represent examples of two different types of innovation likely to be important in personalised medicine, and which operate differently in terms of how the law is applied in practice. In SGT, on the one hand, previous studies demonstrate that patents have little impact on practice for those developing genetic tests in the public sector in the UK because they are largely ignored. In contrast, however, this qualitative interview study finds that law and law-in-practice in NIPT are much more convergent than found in SGT. Those involved in the development and delivery of NIPT are more aware of patents, and balance the costs and benefits of greater engagement or compliance with patent law, in relation to factors such as freedom to operate, litigation, and licensing, in favour of compliance. Compliance can take different forms; licensing is compliance, as is forbearance from using a patented invention in the absence of a patent licence. This article explores the factors relevant to patent law compliance in NIPT, and further considers the implications for the field of personalised medicine. It argues that, as the prevalent means to promote openness, access, and affordability in biomedicine are founded on the existing legal structures of intellectual property rights, such solutions will only be effective and adopted when these existing legal structures of intellectual property law are recognised and respected in the relevant field. It is therefore essential that such solutions only be deployed with a nuanced understanding of the operation of the law-in-practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Great Britain Supreme Court's approach to standard essential patent protection in Unwired Planet v Huawei. Topics include eating a small slice from a very large cake may be more rewarding than consuming all of a much smaller confection, the user of the standard will require to use also the patented elements, and the patent owner will be entitled to a return for use of their technology.

In times of crisis, innovation and entrepreneurship can be considered as a path out of valuation uncertainty of firms. All types of innovation output, however, may not have a similar impact across different firm size and sectors during bad times. Specifically, financially less-constrained (high leverage) innovative firms could be valued higher or experience less uncertainty in their performance. By considering the innovation intensity and leverage in pre- and post-2008 financial crisis periods, and using firm-level quarterly data from listed firms in the UK during 2000–2014, we find that leveraged firms can achieve greater valuation and mitigate any valuation uncertainty in the post-crisis period if they are knowledge- or high-technology intensive. In terms of size effect, although leverage distorts market valuation of large UK firms, the impact is positive for SMEs that are innovation intensive. Finally, in terms of sectoral effect, firms within manufacturing and services with leverage have benefitted from R&D and patenting activities during the post-crisis period, but not in the pre-crisis period. This also gets revealed when we classify all firms into high-tech and low-tech sectors, implying that firms in the high-tech sectors with debt dependence have benefitted favorably in terms of higher valuation and lower uncertainty in the post-crisis period, not firms in the low-technology sectors, reflecting further the role of technological intensity in firm valuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior work indicates that proximity facilitates learning, but proximity reflects individual choices. New data on a British post-World War 2 program to detain and interrogate German industrial experts allow us to minimize selection bias and to disentangle individual dimensions of proximity. Our empirical analysis of post-detention patenting activities suggests that cognitive proximity was more important for interactive learning than social and institutional proximity. Detention in the UK increased inventors' subsequent likelihood of interacting with UK partners as well as their post-detention patent output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United Kingdom the law and medical guidance is supportive of women making choices in childbirth. NICE guidelines are explicit that a competent woman's informed request for MRCS (elective caesarean in the absence of any clinical indications) should be respected. However, in reality pregnant women are routinely denied MRCS. In this paper I consider whether there is sufficient justification for restricting MRCS. The physical and emotive significance of childbirth as an event in a woman's life cannot be understated. It is, therefore, concerning that women are having their wishes ignored, and we must ascertain whether the denial of agency is justifiable. To answer this question I first demonstrate that access to MRCS is a lottery in the UK. Second, I argue that there is nothing unique about pregnancy that displaces the ethical norm of respecting patents' sufficiently autonomous choices. Thus, the starting presumption is that all informed choices regarding MRCS should be respected. To ascertain whether any restriction of MRCS is justifiable the burden of proof must be placed on those who argue that MRCS is ethically impermissible. I argue that the most common justifications in the literature against MRCS are insufficient to displace the presumption in favour of autonomous choice in childbirth. I conclude that MRCS should be available to pregnant women, and we must strive to reduce the lottery in access to choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Inventions have been protected, in England, by patents since the sixteenth century. The patent system has undergone significant change since that time - in the nineteenth century, major legislative reforms were undertaken in the shadow of an abolitionist movement; and in the twentieth century, the system began to accommodate radical technological developments. This research applies insights from evolutionary theory, allowing a focus on the range of parties involved in the system and an acknowledgement of how these parties have changed as the system and society have developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Physicians have long worried about gene patents' potential to restrict their medical practices. Fortune and hindsight have proven these worries exaggerated both in the UK and elsewhere. Neither current nor future medical practices appear to be impinged by gene patents, although they may be subject to future intellectual property disputes. Sources of data: Qualitative and quantitative (survey) studies of gene patents' effects on medical practice; recent developments in patent law. Areas of agreement: Traditional gene patents do not appear to have restricted medical practice in the UK, although their effect elsewhere has been more nuanced. Areas of controversy: Whether patents will restrict the spread of newer medical technologies is unresolved. Areas timely for developing research: Continuing survey data on practitioners' views concerning patents' role in the distribution of newer technologies would be beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Endogenous growth models raise fundamental questions about the nature of human creativity, and the sorts of resources, skills, and knowledge inputs that shift the frontier of technology and production possibilities. Many argue that the experience of early British industrialization supports the thesis that economic advances depend on specialized scientific training, the acquisition of costly human capital, and the role of elites. This paper examines the contributions of different types of knowledge to industrialization, by assessing the backgrounds, education and inventive activity of major contributors to technological advances in Britain during the crucial period between 1750 and 1930. The results indicate that scientists, engineers or technicians were not well-represented among the cadre of important British inventors, and their contributions remained unspecialized until very late in the nineteenth century. The informal institution of apprenticeship and learning on the job provided effective means to enable productivity and innovation. For developing countries today, the implications are that costly investments in specialized human capital resources might be less important than incentives for creativity, flexibility, and the ability to make incremental adjustments that can transform existing technologies into inventions and innovations that are appropriate for prevailing domestic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The selection and establishment of research partners is increasingly important in innovation and strategic research. Using a panel dataset of patents by 2846 researchers from a large US biotechnology company between 1976 and 2013, we examined the relationships between spanning structural holes and partner dynamics, which are captured by the entry of new partners and the persistence of existing partners. Then, we tested the possible moderating effect of dynamic exploratory ability. Based on the results of negative binomial regression models with fixed effects in the longitudinal design, we found that spanning structural holes was negatively associated with the entry of new partners and positively associated with the persistence of existing partners. Furthermore, exploratory ability positively moderated these relationships. Aside from having managerial implications for innovators, the findings of our interdisciplinary study are relevant for research on partner dynamics, strategy research, and exploration processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threats legislation in the UK may be viewed by those outside the country as a peculiar British animal confined to these shores. Our article explores how new UK threats legislation may have international reach beyond future-proofing itself for the potential introduction of the Unified Patent Court. It also selects some earlier high-profile cases involving threats, and considers whether they might be decided differently under the new law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception, patent law has had many faces, manifesting different aims and functions. The latest recalibrations of the aims and functions of patent law are striking because - at its core - patent law itself has not changed significantly in this time. This paper examines the chameleon-like nature of the function of patents, tracking historical transformations from the privilege as an instrument of trade policy, to patents as an incentive/reward to invent and disclose the invention, and the most recent shift towards viewing patents as necessary for innovation. In particular, the paper addresses whether the latest shift represents a reversion to privilege-like functions, due to the analogous focus on commercialisation, and argues that this is not the case because of the fundamental move to focusing on patentees rather than society as a whole and to seeing patents as property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biological medicines are derived from living cells and organisms. Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are biological agents that are widely used to treat malignancies including non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. They are effective but expensive. The patents for many mAbs are expiring, so biosimilar medicines, which contain a version of the active ingredient of the original drug, are being developed. Biological medicines cannot be assessed in the same way as standard generic medications because they are difficult to copy and can change over time. A pathway regulates how biosimilars are assessed and compared with the original drug to ensure they are highly similar and have no clinically meaningful differences in terms of structure, function, pharmacodynamics and mechanism of action, pharmacokinetic properties, clinical efficacy and safety. Truxima® ▼(rituximab), the first biosimilar monoclonal antibody to be approved for use in the UK in an oncology setting, is biosimilar to intravenous (IV) rituximab; rituximab improves the effectiveness of standard chemotherapy for lymphoma. The two drugs are comparable in efficacy and safety and have the same indications, dosing regimen and storage procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines changes in the allocation of research and development (R&D) funding in Great Britain. The British Research and Innovation public body was established by the government to manage the allocation of six billion British pounds of annual R&D funding. Universities are advised to collaborate with businesses or create subsidiary companies to commercialize their research. Obtaining patent protection should precede any disclosure of information on the research.