India's decision on Gleevec: implications for the future.

32 MAY 2013 healthcare financial management The patent is a secondary rather than a primary patent, and the court rejected it as not being a novel invention because Novartis had patented a version of Gleevec in 1993, which it later abandoned. The focus on how innovative the secondary patent is relative to the first patent has potentially large ramifications for biologics, where innovations may be step-wise and incremental. It could also affect patent requests for small molecule drugs, as well, which can occasionally amount to follow-on patents reflecting only incremental changes from the original patents.