Life sciences come to life again, this time in Berlin

The best part of a year ago ("A matter of life and death? No, it's more important than that. Life sciences in the limelight", here), this Kat waxed lyrical on the then-forthcoming Life Sciences IP Summit 2014. Well, now he is looking at the programme for the Life Sciences IP Summit 2015 -- coming up in Berlin on Thursday 22 and Friday 23 October. Much has happened since last year's event, including a shift of venue from Amsterdam. Could this have been anything to do with Merpel's saucy comments about how appropriate it was to host such a sexy subject in a city famed for its Red Light District? Probably not.  While this year's conference venue is the highly respectable NH Berlin Friedrichstrasse Hotel, Berlin is historically as apt a venue for a sexy subject as is Amsterdam, as anyone who has ever seen Liza Minelli and friends in Cabaret will soon concede.

But what about the subject itself? The impending European patent package, having now been declared lawful by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) following two legal challenges by Spain [Cases C-146 and 147/13, noted by the IPKat here], is gradually metamorphosing from blueprint to reality. Arrangements are now being made for the training of judges, the provision of court facilities and the projecting of existing patenting and dispute resolution techniques on to a fresh canvas. This is a scenario in which the accumulated experience, knowledge and wisdom of the life science sector cannot be relied upon in the absence of rigorous double-checking against a new framework for patenting, new litigation rules and -- this is going to hurt the most -- a set of complex transitional provisions.  Unsurprisingly, then, this year's programme features a mock trial before the Unified Patent Court with real live judges [readers may already be familiar with this weblog's serialised and ongoing account of Bristows' test-drive of the 17th Edition of the Draft UPC rules here, here, here and here] as well as sessions on whether to exercise the opt-out option and on the nuts and bolts of patent enforcement. At times of change and uncertainty, it's comforting to be able to share one's anxieties and pick up ideas in the company of one's life science peers and compatriots rather than have to rub shoulders for a couple of days with those who work in other disciplines and do not share one's commercial reflexes.

Headache? No, just
second medical use ...

The sudden return to the headlines of problems relating to second medical use patents, both on last year's AIPPI agenda and in Warner-Lambert's mega-litigation with Actavis over pregabalin [see eg the hugely popular Katposts by Darren, Annsley and even Jeremy here, here, here, here and here] pretty well guaranteed that this issue would feature on this year's programme (incidentally, this is the substantive legal issue that has attracted more comments by IPKat readers than any other topic right across the whole sphere of intellectual property law). On another topic, now that the CJEU has given so many rulings -- and caused so many headaches -- in the field of supplementary protection certificates (SPCs), it's the turn of the national courts to work out what Europe's senior court meant. Accordingly the aftermath of these major rulings is also on the agenda [if you want to check on the past year's SPC developments, a quick click-through on The SPC Blog will convince you that there's plenty to chew on].

A European focus comes naturally to this Kat, but he notes that the programme goes wider than that.  China-watcher and a former occasional contributor to this weblog Tom Carver leads the session on enforcing pharma patents in that vast, imponderable jurisdiction.  The United States is also on the menu and, in this Kat's view, the choicest morsel on the menu is a comparison of the position relating to personal medicine patents as between the US and Europe. This session is led by Emil Pot (General Counsel, Actogenix, Belgium) and Brian Coggio (Of Counsel, Fish & Richardson, United States), a combination that instantly brought to the mind of this blogger the classic Dr Seuss image on the right. Personalised medicine, incidentally, has proved to be a very live topic in the past twelve-month, as readers' responses to Suleman Ali's February 2015 blogpost on that topic demonstrate.

Watching out for icebergs -- or ice cubes?*

The programme finishes with a topic that may very well kick off the 2016 edition of this event: the Nagoya Convention on Bio-Diversity and EU Regulation 511/2014. This session is branded "How to Assess and Mitigate Risks" but perhaps should have been subtitled "How to Make Up for Previous Efforts to Pretend Nagoya Wasn't Happening" since that is what, it seems to this blogger, too many people have been doing up to now.  If you still don't know why you should worry about the Nagoya Protocol, the Kats can offer you some background reading here. What's not clear to this blogger is whether compliance with Nagoya is going to cause real problems in practice or whether it's a bit like a giant iceberg that will have melted into little ice cubes by the time it hits your dinghy.

If you're booking for this event, some discounts are available to suitably designated souls.  If you book online, or email C5's affable Nathan Denham here, quoting the organisers' VIP Katcode P15-999-KAT16, you can expect to enjoy the benefit of a handsome 15% reduction on the registration fee

* Cat illustration from Bailey Boat Cat. Adventures of a feline afloat, here