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B. Appropriate Procedures to Protect the Quality of Patents

The examination of patent application is an in-depth work which

requires skills and expertise in pharmaceutical area. Patent offices all over the
globe experience challenges to their capacity to assess each patent application

within limited resources. Recently, genuine concerns have been raised about

the capacity of examiners to execute their duties proficiently, and hence to
(20)
maintain patent quality. In particular, developing countries are facing acute
challenges with respect to the expertise of examiners and the availability of

the resources. The shortage of personnel with adequate skills mean that

examiners in the South generally examine more number of patents than do
(21)
the examiners in the North. This problem is usually worsened by the lack
of the access to evidence of prior art and the unavailability of relevant

database.

As a result, crucial policy mechanisms that can be employed to

improve the examination quality are pre-grant and post-grant patent
oppositions. These tools have been employed in both developed and

developing nations alike. They permit concerning parties to bring claims before

the examiners that a specific patent does not satisfy the domestic

requirements on patentability. By these ways, the quality of patents is

(20)
Beth Simone Noveck, ççPeer to Patentû: Collective Intelligence, Open Review, and Patent
Reform,é†Harvard Journal of Law & Technology†20 (2006): 123-124.
(21)
For instance, in India, during the period of 2008 - 2009, 36,812 patent applications were
submitted, while there were merely 75 examiners in their patent office during this period.
21
This means a proportion of around 490 licenses documented per an examiner. In contrast,
in the same period there were 134,542 patent application submitted to the European Patent
Office (EPO), and they had 5234 examiners, with the corresponding proportion at the office

is 26 patents filed per an examiner; European Patent Office Annual Report (2009), 47.

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