EPAM together with Eversheds Sutherland managed to have unlawful judgments cancelled by the Intellectual Property Court for the second time, thus progressing in the protection of Bayer’s intellectual property rights.
BAYER and other global pharma leaders (Novartis AG, Orion Corp., Bristol-Myers Squibb and others) faced systemic breaches of their intellectual rights by a mala fide Russian manufacturer. The company has been marketing generic drugs from the list of vital and essential drugs prior to expiry of patent rights to original drugs. Considering the lower prices of generic drugs – arising from the price registration regulations – the company is engaged in the state procurement system and has been squeezing out the reference drugs.
BAYER, producing its innovative cancer treatment drug Nexavar, had to go to court in order to protect its intellectual rights.
At the first round of the proceedings, the court dismissed the claim and evaded from a patent expert examination. However, thanks to the efforts put by the legal team, the Intellectual Property Court cancelled those judgments and sent the case for retrial.
At the retrial, the attorneys managed to retrieve the registration file of the disputed generic drug from the Russian Ministry of Health and to file on the record its commercial samples purchased under the notarization of evidence. As a result, those materials provided the basis for the opinion issued by a forensic expert, who confirmed the breach of BAYER’s patent rights. However, the courts dismissed the claims stating that the respondent’s generic had been employing not only BAYER inventions but its own patent as well, although evidence to the contrary had been filed on the record.
In the Intellectual Property Court, the legal team proved that the conclusions made by lower courts were in gross violation of the rules of substantive law, conflicted with the documents provided by the Russian Ministry of Health, lacking due regard to the forensic expert examination and were ignoring the case law in similar disputes, which was developed with direct involvement of EPAM attorneys.
As a result, the Intellectual Property Court cancelled the respective judgments and sent the case for retrial by a new panel of judges.
BAYER was represented by Partners Valery Eremenko and Vera Rikhterman, Litigation Associate Vladimir Rodionov and Litigation Paralegal Oleg Kurin from EPAM and by Partner Ekaterina Tilling and Associate Ekaterina Lobysheva, from Eversheds Sutherland.
