Manish Rajan of livemint.com reported that the Delhi High Court on Monday dismissed the petition filed by Global Biopharma major UCB Frachim against the Indian generic major Cipla and the Indian Patent Office over rejection of its patent for a new anti-allergic drug. In its petition, UCB requested the Court to quash the order passed by the Controller General of Patents on July 24, 2009 rejecting its claims. The High Court directed UCB Farchim to file its appeal before the Intellectual Property Appellate Board instead of a High Court. However, still we are not sure which drug and patent application is subject of dispute. Even the Indian Patent Office does not have the Controller decision uploaded on the IPIRS database.

The Indian Patent Office (IPO) has published total 794 patents in the month of January. These patents are made publically available by weekly patent journals published every Friday. The bibliographic details published by the patent journal include patent number, application number, filing date, priority date, publication date u/s 11A, issuing patent office, title and the assignee.

In India, patents are valid for a period of 20 years calculated from the date of filing/priority of the patent application whichever is earlier. The issued patents are open for post-grant opposition u/s 25 (2) for a period of one year from the date of publication of patent issuance. Any party interested in opposing a patent need to file an opposition application within this one year window period to initiate revocation proceedings at the Appellate level or else party need to take expensive and time-consuming route of approaching the High Court once the on year window period is closed.

Last month total 794 issued patents were published by the IPO with the Chennai Patent Office leading the number of issued patents. US telecommunication major Qualcomm leaded the number with 51 patents followed by Government-funded Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) and PSU Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited (BHEL) with 17 and 14 patents respectively. 35% of total published patents were issued by the Chennai Patent Office, 28% each by Delhi and Kolkata Patent Offices and 9% by the Mumbai Patent Office. Global petrochemical majors ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron continue to expand their respective patent portfolios in India. Global pharmaceutical majors Pfizer, Merck, Glaxo, Roche, AstraZeneca, & Novartis too received Indian patents for their new products and innovations. Interestingly, Internet major Google continue to adding more business method patents in India.