The Finale of PharmBioTech Competition, organized by the Skolkovo Foundation and its industrial partners, took place on December 5, 2022. The Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO) has been supporting competitions for pharmaceutical and medical technology startups at Skolkovo since 2018. This year, the EAPO was represented on the jury of the competition by the examiners Aurelia Ceban and Valentin Kulikov.

The competition traditionally pays a lot of attention to intellectual property. “It is encouraging to see that this year almost all participants in the competition demonstrate an understanding of the need and importance of protecting intellectual property created by them,” said Aurelia Ceban, Deputy Director of the EAPO Examination Department – Director of the Chemistry and Medicine Division, “Almost every startup entered in the program, provided information on patent applications filed or on patents already granted, including those abroad.”

“Pharmaceutical and medical topics do not lose their relevance. The EAPO notes a large number of applications in this area, the activity of applicants is growing every year. The first international conference IP-Eurasia organized by the Office, in September this year, was focused on the pharmaceutical agenda. We see that health protection remains a basic need of society, and the EAPO considers it important to develop its own pharma competence, as well as to support events that consolidate health products and technologies and IP on the common platform. One of the key areas of our activity is the expansion of the EAPO Pharmaceutical Register. Now national patents can also be registered in it, and we expect it to become an effective tool for protecting the rights of patent holders,” said EAPO President Grigory Ivliev.

According to the results of the PharmBioTech competition, a group of projects in the field of innovative drugs developed jointly by a team of researchers from the “IPHAR” Innovative Pharmacology Research (Russia, Tomsk) was awarded the EAPO medal “Advancing the Future”. The projects present new synthesized chemical compounds with antithrombotic activity, analgesic effects, and antiviral activity.

The EAPO examiners evaluated the novelty of the project, its social significance, the prospects for marketing the product, and the patent protection portfolio of these innovations.