BMS: Broken patent office proceedings killing innovation
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
While Senator Charles Grassley (Republican-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on 7 May said he was "comfortable with where we are on the language" of a bill aimed at again overhauling the US patent system, the lawmaker said he's also heard the pleas by some stakeholders, including the biopharmaceutical industry, to make tweaks to certain US Patent & Trademark Office (US PTO) proceedings, known as the post-grant (PGR) and inter partes (IPR) reviews.