Biotech patents stuck in limbo

New patents in Taiwan's infant biotechnology industry hit a brick wall when they reach the government's regulatory body, as there aren't enough examiners to cope with the workload, experts said yesterday.

"The speed of the review process is quite slow as there are very few biotechnology reviewers at the Intellectual Property Office [IPO]," said Liang Chi-ming (梁啟銘) of the Academica Sinica's Institute of Biological Chemistry. "This creates a bottleneck."

Liang was speaking on the second and final day of a Taiwan-Europe government-level joint seminar on intellectual property rights (IPR) protection and enforcement in Taipei yesterday.

Taiwan currently has 150 patent examiners, according to statistics from the IPO, which is under the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The vast majority work on information technology innovations, such as computer chip circuit design.

Reviewers dedicated to biotechnology and medicine number as few as 20. Another 50 examiners are being recruited this year, but only two will be assigned to biotech, sources at the IPO said yesterday without giving their names.

Biotech companies are feeling the pinch.

"The IPO does not have enough examiners with a biotechnology background," Ben Liang (梁明華), head of research and development at Biowell Technology (博微生科), said in a telephone interview.

"They often have to outsource the work to universities which have the technical knowledge, but don't have the professional patent knowledge, so cases are passed back and forth. It takes us three to five years to get a patent," Liang said.

But Taiwan may not be unique in having a backlog of biotech patents pending.

"Biotech is a new field and the patent process takes a long time as not enough people have the relevant background or knowledge," Liang said.

"It also takes two to three years to get a patent in the US, and even up to 10 years in a controversial case," he said.

The US Patent and Trademark Office is also trying to simplify the patent application procedure for biotech inventions.

The office intends to limit the number of inventions claimed in one application to speed up the process, according to a statement on its Web site dated Monday.

Taiwan is now addressing the problem.

"There are currently very few biotech patent reviewers, but next year we will have a new system for utilizing patent number registration that could save manpower in this field," Hsieh Ming-yang (謝銘洋), a law professor at National Taiwan University, said at the seminar without elaborating.

From 1976 until the end of last year, the IPO granted almost 20,000 patents in the field of biotechnology and related areas, its statistics show.

Of those, 56 were for Chinese herbs, 8,019 for biotechnology innovations and 10,669 for medicines.