Outline of ‘Novartis AG V. Union of India & Others’ with reference to the Concept of Evergreening of Patents and Section 3 (D) of the Indian Patents (Amendment) Act, 2005
Novartis International AG is the world’s leading pharmaceutical and healthcare company based in Basel, Switzerland who filed a patent application (1602/ MAS/ 1998) for its anti-cancer drug Gleevec in India. But the patent application of Novartis was rejected by Indian Patent Office, Madras High Court, Intellectual Property Appellate Board and finally by Apex Court of India as it was hit by Section 3(d) of the Patent Act, 1970 which prevented this pharmaceutical company from evergreening their drug in India by making minute changes to the already known patented product. This landmark case by elaborating the scope of Section 3 (d) of Indian Patent (Amendment) Act, 2005 halted attempts of pharmaceutical giants to evergreen their drugs and sell them at high price. This judgment also backed various Indian pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors to make availability of generic version of anti-cancer drugs at affordable price for the people living in developing nation like India.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits remixing, adapting, and building upon the work for non-commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.