02.12.2024

STOICA & ASSOCIATII wins a series of injunctions for a pharmaceutical colossus

The lawyer’s team from STOICA & ASOCIAȚII - Dragoș Bogdan (Managing Partner) and Mihai Stănescu (Managing Associate) -, acting for a major global manufacturer of innovative medicines, won in a series of litigations the provisional ban on the sale of competing products by other major pharmaceutical companies, which violated the exclusive rights conferred by a patent.

The litigations concerned a very important medicine, having annual sales of over 4.5 billion euros. In the context of the termination of protection over the active substance of the drug in question, several generic drug companies tried to enter the Romanian market, ignoring the existence of a second-generation patent - which protected other characteristics of the drug than the active substance.

Dragoș Bogdan: ”Our mission was particularly complex, involving overcoming two types of obstacles to convince the courts to issue the presidential injunctions: firstly, demonstrating the existing rights in the context of an extensive case-law at the European and even at the global level regarding the validity of the patent; secondly, demonstrating the infringement of the patent by generic medicines, despite some highly technical features in the patent claims and the limited evidentiary possibilities determined by the procedural framework.”

The success achieved by the STOICA & ASOCIAȚII’s team ensures that the manufacturer of the innovative medicine respects the monopoly resulting from the patent, an essential aspect in the pharmaceutical field, practically the only way to cover the high research and development expenses involved in discovering and launching a new medicine on the market.