The variety and complexity of living matter means that protecting intellectual property in the field of life sciences is particularly challenging . Furthermore, our clients from the epharmaceutical and agrochemical industries have a number of special factors to deal with, only a few of which may be mentioned here by way of example:

• Delayed exploitation: regulatory approval can often be protracted and tedious, with an uncertain outcome, and it determines the time at which it is possible to exploit an invention, so that the legislator had to find special arrangements in order to compensate the proprietors of patents on medicinal or plant protection products by patent term extension.
• The huge cost pressure especially in the pharmaceutical sector in view of groaning health systems worldwide: this has placed patent legislation and case law in the field of life science inventions in the focus of public interest, which is not infrequently accompanied by an impairment of the protection and exploitation of those inventions.
• Ethical and moral considerations: certain technical areas of the life sciences are excluded from patenting.
• Self-replicating inventions: their particularity tends to make it difficult for the patent proprietor to receive his just reward.

At the same time, precisely these special factors offer an opportunity to tailor the protection in such a way that, on balance, the company is assured of economic success.

We have dedicated ourselves to procuring this protection for our clients.

Our life-science team is headed by experienced patent attorneys, all of whom have doctorates in the sciences and can demonstrate many years of experience in industrial property law. Our attorneys are supported by associates with university degrees and of course by our firm’s secretariat, which always performs the administrative tasks with great care and expertise in view of the value of intellectual property, especially in the life sciences.