Besides impacting companies, Minister Dias Toffoli’s injunction suspending the effects of the Sole Paragraph of Art.40 of the Brazilian Industrial Property Law (Law 9.279/96) for pharmaceutical products and processes also affects other institutions dedicated to research and development. In recent orders, in order to comply with the injunction, the BPTO has reduced patent terms granted to a few universities, of which 11% are public. The Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), for example, has had four patents with reduced terms, one of them for four years.
BPTO data confirm that it is not just companies that benefit from the patent system. In 2019, among the top 20 institutions with invention patents, 17 are public universities, and three are companies. The University of Campinas (Unicamp), the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), the Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), the State University of Sao Paulo (Unesp), and UFMG are among the biggest resident applicants of invention patents in Brazil.
The first in the ranking, UFPB registered 100 patent applications in 2019 versus 94 in the previous year. UFCG made 90 registrations, compared to 82 in 2018. In 2020, even with the pandemic, Unicamp was granted 106 new patents, 101 of which in Brazil, an increase of 42% compared to 2018. Last year 64 patents were filed, and more than 110 communications of inventions were received by the Innovation Agency. As a result, Unicamp now has a portfolio of 1,212 patents.
