On December 9th, during an event to commemorate the BPTO’s 50th anniversary, Gabriel Leonardos, ABPI’s first vice president, defended the institute’s financial autonomy. “ABPI’s historic position for decades is for greater financial autonomy for the BPTO”, he stated. “Recently, the STF (Federal Supreme Court) reiterated its understanding, which has always been peaceful, that the fee charged by the BPTO is a public price and, as such, must fully revert to the Institute’s activities”.
Leonardos joined the opening table of the XII Academic Meeting on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Development (ENAPID), from December 9th to 11th, with Cláudio Furtado, the president of the BPTO, José Graça Aranha, the regional director of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and Celso Luiz Salgueiro Lage, the head of the postgraduate and research division of the BPTO Academy. The theme of the event was “BPTO of the Future – BPTO+50”.
The first vice president of ABPI praised the successive BPTO administrations and highlighted the management of former President Luiz Otávio Pimentel, “who can be credited with the joint BPTO/ANVISA ordinance of April 2017 that ended 18 years of legal uncertainty”. He also congratulated the current management, which is fighting the patent backlog, “which shamed Brazil and prevented the innovation of Brazilian companies”. At the event, the BPTO’s president announced that the Plan to Fight against Patent Backlog has already resulted in a 50% reduction in the stock of patent applications, dropping from around 149 thousand to approximately 75 thousand, between August 2019 and the first week of December 2020.
