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Pfizer: China Overturns Viagra Patent
07.07.2004, 05:44 AM
Pfizer Inc. said Wednesday that
its Chinese patent for Viagra
had been overturned and that it would appeal.
Pfizer "is extremely disheartened by this recent action," the company said in a statement. It said its China patent for the anti-impotence drug would remain in effect while it appeals.
Foreign drug companies have been watching the case as a test of China's commitment to intellectual property rights.
The patent re-examination board of China's State Intellectual Property Office overturned Pfizer's 2001 patent on the use of sildenafil citrate, Viagra's main ingredient, the statement said. It didn't say when the board issued its ruling.
Phone calls to the SIPO weren't answered Wednesday afternoon and there was no reference to the ruling on the agency's Web site.
A group of Chinese drug companies had petitioned the office to nullify Pfizer's patent for sildenafil citrate, say it failed to fulfill the "novelty requirement" of Chinese law.
Under that requirement, a patent can only be granted if no identical invention has been published or used within the country.
New York-based Pfizer has already lost patent protection for Viagra through similar challenges in Colombia and Venezuela.
Viagra was launched in the United States in 1998. Two years later it was approved for use in China, where Pfizer sells it under the brand name "Wan Ai Ke."
But after six months on the market, the official Xinhua News Agency reported that some 90 percent of Viagra pills sold in Shanghai, the country's largest city, were fake.
Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Josette Shiner in November called the Pfizer Viagra patent challenge a "particularly troubling" example of a questionable Chinese commitment to intellectual property rights. source :-http://www.forbes.com/ | 
