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Paris First Instance Court - BIOGARAN v/ ASTELLAS


Decision date

2013-05-17

Decision No.

13/52238

Nature

Patent

Country

France

Jurisdiction

Paris First Instance Court

Parties

BIOGARAN v/ ASTELLAS



The BIOGARAN company was represented by Arnaud Casalonga and Marianne Gabriel Attorneys at law, assisted by Gérard Dossmann, Patent Attorney.

The company Astellas Pharma owns a European patent on a continuous release formulation that can be used in particular for the tamsulosin hydrochloride.

It commenced proceedings against several laboratories of generic drugs to ask for provisional bans of commercialization and withdrawal of disputed products from the market.

The judge considered that the likelihood of an infringement of Astellas Pharma’s IP rights did not appear sufficiently established with respect to the validity of the invoked patent and the reality of the alleged infringement.

Indeed, even though there was no prior identical art, the judge considered that, according to the documents submitted, the novelty of claim 1 of the invoked patent was genuinely disputed.

The judge also noted the existence of genuine disputes with regard to counterfeiting, as the summary of the product’s characteristics did not allow, by itself, to prove the infringement, and the tests that were submitted to the Court concerned other laboratories’ products, which were not proven to be identical to those of Biogaran.