The IP Hall of Fame welcomes new inductees on an annual basis. Via the nomination process, anyone in the global IP community can put forward a name to be considered by the IP Hall of Fame Academy, comprising all living IP Hall of Fame inductees and specially invited international IP thought-leaders.

The Hall of Fame was established by IAM in 2006 as a not-for-profit project and each year they open up the vote to the IP community.  Once the nomination process closes, they submit all nominations to the IP Hall of Fame Academy who then select the inductees for that year.  The 2010 nomination process is open until 2nd December 2009 and the inductees will be announced in February of next year.

For further details and to make a nomination click here.  A full list of Academy members can be found here.

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This ardent rush and the intense lobbying done to be the first on the medical scene with a new, breakthrough wonder drug that turns out to be the goose that lays the company’s golden eggs is “simply unacceptable”, in the words of Thomas Pogge, Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. The academic, who spoke at length on the subject in his lecture titled, “Advanced Medicines: Must We Exclude the Global Poor?” at the Federation of European Pharmacological Societies (EPHAR) 2008 Congress hosted by the British Pharmacological Society at the University of Manchester and sponsored by AstraZeneca, said that the current patent system followed by the pharmaceutical industry and the tactics used by the industry to protect the system were not morally acceptable because they “violate the human rights of the poor by denying them access to vital medicines.”

In a humanitarian effort to bring down the mortality and morbidity rates found among the poor all over the world, the professor proposes an alternative licensing system which he has named the “Health Impact Fund” (HIF). The HIF seems to be more of an accessory than an alternative, with Prof. Pogge wanting governments across the globe to bankroll this initiative and offer the patent holder of any new medicine annual payments that are directly proportional to the global health impact of the medicine. In short, the more effective the drug is at alleviating the health problems of the world’s poor, the more lucrative it will be for the manufacturer.

While this is an altruistic model that also has the potential to be profitable for drug manufacturers, there’s just one major drawback – the assumption that drug companies are willing to even consider that there’s a moral aspect to their trade. All they seem to be looking for is instant and immense profits, and the larger their monopoly, the more the money they make before any side effects are found and a public outcry and subsequent pull-out ensue.

Prof. Pogge states that his model is bound to be both humanitarian and profitable for the drug companies, but the latter will not be willing to wait for the efficacy of their drug to be proved before they receive the windfall they think they deserve. Rather, they are all for pressurizing experts in the medical field to testify to the wonders that their drug can work, especially when it comes to controlling the symptoms of lifestyle diseases. We’ve seen and heard of cases where experts who wrote glowing testimonials of a cholesterol-lowering drug were found to have vested interests in the profitability of the drug since they themselves were shareholders in the company.

So you see, when it’s a question of a patent in the drug industry, man proposes and the big Pharma disposes!

This post was contributed by Guest Barista Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of the top ten pharmacy schools. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com.

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In the article, written for Popular Science Monthly, the author relates how, at the time it was written, there were nearly 118,000 applications for patents piled up in Washington in the greatest jam of history.  And new ones were pouring in at the rate of approximately 2,000 a week.

In the previous four years, the number of applications awaiting action had leaped from about 41,000 to nearly three times that number, about 118,000.  These piled-up applications contained more than twenty-three acres of paper.

At present, the staff of examiners is gaining on this accumulated mass of applications at the slow rate of about 250 a week.  Even if they continue to work at top speed, without vacations, it is estimated that it will take the present staff until 1942 to catch up with their work so they can give the inventor a reasonably prompt decision upon his application.  As it is now, forty-five percent of all patents, or approximately every other one, take longer than two years to obtain. Some take several times that period.

And, talk of patent anarchy was abundant as the “flood” of applications poured in and comparisons are made back 100 years:

During the last ten years, more patents have been granted in the United States than during the 100 years from President Washington’s inaugural in 1789 to President Harrison’s inaugural in 1889.  In 1929, 114,496 applications for patents, trade-marks, and designs poured into the Washington office.  And thus far in 1930, there has been a twelve percent increase over the record-breaking flood of last year.  Besides mechanical inventions, the Patent Office passes on about 5,000 designs and 20,000 trade-marks a year. Recently, the requests for trade-marks has increased 100 percent.

Sound familiar?

It is interesting to note that even then, the Patent Office collected more fees than it spent:

Yet, while the Patent Office has been giving poorer and poorer service and has been losing money for American inventors, it has been piling up for the Government a profit of more than six million dollars!

In fact, it is one of the few Federal bureaus that operates at a profit. Over a long period of years, its income has far surpassed its expenditures, although recently it has been running behind. However, from fees paid by inventors alone, $3,000,000 was collected by this office last year.

If the Patent Office is making money, why doesn’t it hire enough men to do its work? That is a natural question, one of many mystifying angles of this patent muddle for which I have sought the answer.  I have talked with the Commissioner of Patents, Thomas E. Robertson. I have discussed the situation with many men employed at the Patent Office.  I have interviewed lawmakers who have investigated the work of the Office and patent attorneys who have been dealing with it for years. And the result is the belief that the present disgraceful conditions will continue indefinitely unless the readers of Popular Science Monthly and others who are interested demand Congressional action that will give American inventors the service to which they are entitled.

In answer to the question above, I found that not one penny of the millions of dollars profit made by the Patent Office has been available for improving the service of the organization or for providing better equipment.  The law provides that any money surplus at the end of the year must be turned over to the United States Treasury. Thus the Patent Office has never been able to put its profits to work.  It has been dependent upon the whim of Congress for the amount of money it could spend.

The Patent and Trademark Office would receive $1.9 billion in fiscal 2008 under the budget plan by President Bush. This is the fourth year in a row the White House has recommended the Congress allow the agency keep fees collected from patent and trademark applications instead of diverting funding to other government programs.

In fiscal year 2006, the Patent Office received a total of 452,633 applications and granted a total of 196,404 patents. According to PTO, examiners examined 332,000 patent applications — the largest number ever — while achieving the lowest patent allowance error rate (3.5 percent) in more than two decades. At 54 percent, the amount of applications reviewed and approved also was the lowest on record.

All things old are new … again.

See the entire story here.

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The makers of Vytorin announced at a medical meeting Sunday that their product lowers cholesterol better than Crestor. Vytorin is a combination of Zetia (ezetimibe) and Zocor (simvastatin), which has been proven to lower the risk of heart attack and stroke. Meanwhile, Crestor’s manufacturer said that when taken in combination with another drug, its product achieves unprecedented cholesterol reduction.

While it is clear that Merck will take a hit, another drug and the top cholesterol lowring drug on the market, Lipitor from Pfizer Inc.’s may suffer most in the new environment because many patients on low doses of Lipitor medicine could reach the necessary cholesterol level at a high dose of Zocor.

Lipitor’s share of new prescriptions fell to 50.5 percent in January 2006 from 52.7 percent in the year-ago period, according to Verispan LLC, a pharmaceutical information company. By April Lipitor’s share of new prescriptions had dropped to 48.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Zocor’s share of new prescriptions rose to 20.4 percent in January 2006 from 19.4 percent a year earlier. It was 21.3 percent in April.

Pfizer insists there’s abundant data proving Lipitor’s superiority over Zocor that will keep physicians loyal. In more DTC advertising, you may have noticed that Pfizer also recently launched their new ad campaign for Lipitor, featuring the doctor who invented the artificial heart (I think I counted seeing this ad over 5 times one eveing last week in just 2 hours of programming). But, Pfizer’s overall strategy remains the same: highlighting Lipitor’s ability to lower cholesterol and protect against heart attacks and strokes.

Lipitor’s share of new prescriptions fell to 50.5 percent in January 2006, down from 52.7 percent in the same period a year before, according to Verispan LLC, a pharmaceutical information company. By April, Lipitor’s share of new prescriptions fell to 48.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Zocor’s share of new prescriptions rose to 20.4 percent in January 2006, up from 19.4 percent in the year-ago period. It was 21.3 percent in April.

It is still unclear how much cheaper generic Zocor will be because of a legal battle over how many companies will be allowed to promote their versions. If there are only two during the first six months, as many believe, the price won’t drop dramatically until the end of the year.

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The piece is labeled with the very unoriginal title “Patently Absurd” – just like a lot of other tired articles – and appears to be another in a long line of Blackberry addict-induced hysteria over the threatened loss of their favorite gadget. Matt takes issue with the fact that the Editors have determined the source of the problem – the lawyers.

How they get to that conclusion I’ll leave to others but it is surprising that they claim that the rise in patent applications has “less to due with genuine innovation than it does with innovative lawyers filing a patent on anything that moves.” I think a lot of technology companies would take issue with that statement. The article does make a good point that it is easier to get a patent issued than to get one invalidated due to the the higher standard of clear and convincing evidence.

There’s really nothing new in the reports of patent anarchy, all decrying that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issues too many “unworthy” patents, which then fall into the hands of the evil Patent Trolls. Legislators and lobbyists for the high-tech industry define the patent troll as an individual or company holding a patent without any designs on marketing an idea. They wait for another company to make a product and then hit them with a patent infringement suit.

But it’s never that simple, is it? Large companies receive far more patents than they utilize in products (IBM received 2,941 patents last year) and they often license others. No one ever mentions how large companies use patents as a hammer to prevent start-up ventures (David’s to their Goliath) from ever breaking into a market.

Critics claim that overpatenting creates a drag on innovation, which sounds reasonable, but it would seem that one person’s overpatenting is another’s claim to rightful ownership. While the ongoing BlackBerry battle between Research In Motion and NTP Inc. has produced calls for a reform of the patent laws, you have to be careful what you wish for.

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