CA Paris, 30/01/2015 : Pour que l’objet d’une revendication de type suisse soit considéré comme nouveau, il faut que la seconde indication thérapeutique visée repose sur un enseignement technique différent, spécifique, par rapport à celui de l’état de la technique.

Cet article a été initialement publié sur le blog Patentmyfrench tenu par Renaud Fulconis.

We have seen in our previous post that the Cour d’appel de Paris, in its decision of January 30, 2015 (Merck Sharp & Dohme v. Actavis Group & Alfred E. Tiefenbacher) affirmed that posology features were admissible in further medical use claims.

Still, in view of the lack of novelty finding of the Court regarding claims 1 to 3 of European patent No. EP 0724444 (the ‘444 patent) filed on October 11, 1994 in the name of Merck & Co, the decision as a whole does not make it much easier for patentees to defend such claims in France.

As a reminder, claim 1 of the ‘444 patent read:

The use of 17β (N-tert-butylcarbamoy-l)-4-aza-5-alpha-androst-1-ene-3-one [i.e. finasteride] for the preparation of a medicament for oral administration useful for the treatment of androgenic alopecia in a person and wherein the dosage amount is about 0.05 to 1.0 mg.

The Court based its decision regarding novelty on two documents.

The first document was European patent No. EP 0285382 (the ‘382 patent) filed on March 30, 1988 in the name of Merck & Co. Inc. According to the Court, the ‘382 patent discloses the use of finasteride for treating androgenic alopecia, as well as, in the case of benign prostatic hypertrophia, oral administration of finasteride and the administration of a dose of finasteride from 5 to 2000, preferably from 5 to 200 mg and in particular of 5, 10, 25 50, 100, 150, 250 and 500 mg. However, the ‘382 patent does not specify the dose claimed in the ‘444 patent.

The second document, the so-called “document S”, is an article by Elizabeth Stoner (one of the inventors of the ‘444 patent): The clinical development of a 5 alpha-reductase inhibitor, finasteride (1990), J. Steroid Biochem. Mol. Biol. 37:375-8. According to the Court this article discloses the use of finasteride for the preparation of a medicament for oral administration useful for the treatment of androgenic alopecia, wherein the dose of the active principle finasteride may vary from 0.04 to 1 mg. It is important to note that the Court did not mention that alopecia treatment by finasteride at this dosage was disclosed in this document. A close reading of the article indeed confirms that it is not the case.

In view of these documents the Court considered that:

With this document S, all the teachings of the Merck patent [i.e. the ‘444 patent] are already disclosed while this patent does not additionally comprise a specific, different technical teaching, from that of the EP 0285382 prior art, so that claim 1 of the EP 0724444 patent is deprived of novelty.

Claim 2: The use as claimed in claim 1 wherein the dosage is 1.0 mg.

This claim thus also lacks novelty, since the S document discloses this dosage in combination with claim 1 which is devoid of any novel technical effect.

Claim 3. The use as claimed in claim 1 or 2 wherein the treatment is of male pattern baldness.

The document EP 0285382 also relates to male pattern baldness and destroys the novelty of this claim combined with the two other revoked claims.

What can we make of all this?

First, we believe that each of the two documents leads to an independent lack of novelty finding regarding claim 1 by the Court.

Thus, when considering document S, the Court apparently construed the term “useful for” of claim 1 as simply meaning “suitable for” (in the sense of the Guidelines for Examination in the EPO, section F-IV, 4.13). Accordingly, the simple fact that document S discloses a medicament which could be used in the treatment of alopecia with the dosage specified in claim 1 is considered novelty destroying by the Court, even if this potential use is not mentioned in the document.

In doing so, the Court did not apply decisions G 1/83, G 5/83 and G 6/83of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO which allowed Swiss-type claims (e.g. the use of compound X for the manufacture of a medicament for the treatment of disease Y) in the EPO’s practice. As a reminder, according to these decisions, it is justifiable to derive the novelty of the preparation of the medicament from a new therapeutic use of said medicament.

In other words, the Court did not consider that the Swiss-type claim 1 of the ‘444 patent could be considered as a further medical use claim. As the Court did not elaborate on its construction of claim 1 in view of document S, it can only be speculated that the Court would have decided differently if the claim had stuck to the phrasing of the Swiss-type claim devised by the EBA, i.e. the use of finasteride for the preparation of a medicament for oral administration useful for the treatment of androgenic alopecia in a person and wherein the dosage amount is about 0.05 to 1.0 mg.

As then regards the lack of novelty finding based on the ‘382 patent, the decisive point in the ratio decidendi of the Court appears to be the lack of “different technical teaching” associated to the posology feature.

The Court derived this requirement from point 6.3. of the reasons in G 2/08:

Therefore, it is important to stress that, beyond the legal fiction of Article 54(5) EPC, for the assessment of novelty and inventive step of a claim in which the only novel feature would be the dosage regime, the whole body of jurisprudence relating to the assessment of novelty and inventive step generally also applies.

In particular, the claimed definition of the dosage regime must therefore not only be verbally different from what was described in the state of the art but also reflect a different technical teaching.

Furthermore, assuming for the sake of argument that the claimed modalities of the dosage regime would only consist in a mere selection within the teaching of a broader prior disclosure in the state of the art, then novelty could only be acknowledged if the criteria developed in the jurisprudence of the boards of appeal with respect to selection inventions would be fulfilled. One typical issue in such kinds of cases is whether the dosage regime defined in the claim has been shown to provide a particular technical effect as compared with what was known in the state of the art.

In the present case, the Court did not state whether it considered that the subject-matter of claim 1 ought to be treated as a selection invention, but nonetheless applied a high standard regarding this novelty requirement, by equating it with a requirement of a showing of a different technical effect over the prior art, which goes beyond what is usually required for a selection invention, or even for inventive step assessment, before the EPO.

Claim 1 of the Merck patent [i.e. the ‘444 patent] recites a dose from about 0.05 to 1.0 mg and this patent specifies, as mentioned above, that ‘it would be desirable to administer the lowest dosage possible of a pharmaceutical compound to a patient and still maintain therapeutic efficacy’.

However, this patent does not indicate that the retained dosages could yield a different result from that obtained with the different dosages specified by the prior patent. The assays reported in the text of the patent indicate that the dosage of 0.2 and 1 mg/day during 6 weeks is ‘useful for the treatment of alopecia’ but nothing indicates that the technical results are different from those yielded by the prior patent. It is not demonstrated that the claimed dosage has an effect on the efficacy or the outcome of the treatment.

It is neither demonstrated that the dosage claimed in the Merck patent leads to potential side effects different from those yielded by the dosages of the prior art.

In any case, regardless of whether the standard applied by the Court should be one of novelty or inventive step, it is likely that, in the present case, the report, by one of the cited experts, that the side effects of finasteride were similar for a dosage of 5 mg or 1 mg convinced the Court that the claimed invention did not deserve a patent.

Accordingly, while this decision establishes that posology features may well be admissible in further medical use claims in France, patentees should still expect a hard time defending them, especially when the claims are of the Swiss type.

CASE REFERENCE: Cour d’appel de Paris, pole 5, 2ème chambre, January 30, 2015, Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Actavis Group EHF et al., RG No. 10/19659.