Every year, of the almost 200,000 patent applications that arrive at the European Office, around 3-3.5% are Italian and, in the field of healthcare and pharmaceutical research, in the last three years, with the crisis and the cut in investments and subsidies , there was a decrease of about 20%. The photograph was taken by Claudio Germinario, consultant to the Italian Patent Society, who spoke at the second national conference on health research in Cernobbio. According to the expert, the figures provided by the institutions «do not tell the story. There are many start-ups and spin-offs that benefit from European subsidies and then die. The most depressing fact is that the large Italian pharmaceutical company no longer exists, the small industry gets by more and more converting to the production of generic drugs and many of the research centers present in our country have been closed". A crisis that is also felt in the biomedical field, "where research is much more expensive and the drop in funding and subsidies has dramatic effects". If it is true, the analysis continues, that «we saw some weak signs of recovery in 2011, in the future we will find ourselves dealing with Chinese patents. Suffice it to say that every year the Chinese patent office receives over 500,000 internal applications». A picture made even more gloomy by the complaint launched by Maurizio De Cicco, vice president of Farmindustria, who spoke at the presentation of the national survey on cancer patients carried out by Censis: «Italy is not a country that favors investments and the fact of not having received no recognition in terms of tax exemption for those who invest leads to preferring other countries where there are better conditions».
Pharmacist33 – 9 November 2011
Patent crisis in the healthcare world
Slight recovery only in the first months of 2011, boom of 'made in China' inventions
"If it's not a depression, we're very close." The diagnosis on the number of patents registered in Italy in the health sector (pharmaceutical and biomedical) is by Claudio Germinario, consultant of the Italian Patent Society: "We are at a drop of 20% in recent years for the health sector - he says - with many pharmaceutical research closed in our country. A bleak picture that only shows feeble signs of recovery in the first months of 2011". The expert, who spoke in Cernobbio at the second national conference on health research, explains the phenomenon: "The number of registered patents signed by Italians every year in Europe is between 3-3.5% of the total (about 200,000 applications).
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