When the world turns to the COVID-19 pandemic, the subject permeating the market, media and society also become the new coronavirus. And at the INPI it couldn’t be different. There are several measures adopted by the municipality to combat the pandemic.
To disclose the technologies that are being developed in Brazil and the world “so that the actors of the Brazilian Innovation System have tools to perform their role with excellence” the BPTO launched the COVID-19 Related Technologies Observatory. On the page, there are studies on new drugs, R&D financing, and new technologies. There are, for example, the tests being carried out by the Phenotypic Screening Platform Laboratory of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICB) of the University of São Paulo (USP), in partnership with Eurofarma, with thousands of drugs for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.
The COVID-19 Related Technologies Observatory also detected the development of a vaccine against COVID-19 by Italian and British scientists, which will begin testing in humans in late April in the United Kingdom, in a group of 550 healthy volunteers. The drug is the result of a partnership between the Italian company Advent-IRBM, from Pomezia, and the Jenner Institute, from the University of Oxford.
Fiocruz (Oswaldo Cruz Foundation) in turn launched a system for monitoring suspect and confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the institution, which will allow active and retired workers, interns, students and fellows of the institution to report their health status regarding symptoms, suspicions and eventual confirmation of COVID-19 cases on an institutional electronic platform developed to monitor these cases at the institution. All of these researches are available on the website of the COVID-19 Related Technologies Observatory.
Study – The BPTO’s COVID-19 Related Technologies Observatory released a study on patent applications for pulmonary ventilators filed in Brazil, allowing the identification of pending applications for analysis and those in force in the country. The study shows that of the 856 applications found, 332 are either pending applications or patents granted in Brazil.
The full study can be accessed here.
Priority procedure – The BPTO also created a priority procedure for patent applications dedicated to pharmaceutical products and processes, and health equipment and/or materials, aiming at the diagnosis, prophylaxis, and treatment of COVID-19.
The priority procedure, effective until July 30th, 2020, “will determine the reduction of the time necessary for the decision on the patent application, also constituting a tool to promote the development of new technologies in this area”.
Other modalities of priority processing can be requested directly by patent applicants to speed up the examination of patents such as “MPE Patents” or “ICT Patents”.
