Enablement meaning

In this issue: Obtaining, amending and implementing planning permission Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 Nationally significant infrastructure projects Planning policy Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Latest Q&A Related Documents Obtaining, amending and implementing planning permission Court considers the question of discharge of pre-commencement conditions (Lisle-Mainwaring v RBKC) In Lisle-Mainwaring v Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea [2024] EWHC 440 (Admin), the court dismissed the contention that a local planning authority (LPA) may decline to determine an application to discharge a condition if the decision is taken after the relevant planning permission has expired. It held that the broader rule—that an LPA’s ongoing duty to determine applications for planning permission and for reserved matters—equally applies to approvals required by planning conditions. This remains the position where an application is submitted before the implementation deadline runs out but is determined later. As this analysis had not been put to the LPA, the court...

Grounds of patent revocation Patents can be revoked (ie taken off the patents register) where they are found invalid in some respect. A revoked patent is treated as though it never existed. The statutory bases for revocation are contained in section 72 of the Patents Act 1977 (PA 1977). These include that the invention is not patentable (eg it lacks novelty, inventiveness or industrial applicability) and that the specification fails to disclose the invention with sufficient clarity and completeness for a person skilled in the art to put it into effect. This deficiency is called ‘insufficiency’. This Practice Note focuses on patent invalidity arising from insufficiency. For details on other invalidity grounds, see the following Practice Notes: Patent invalidity—grounds of revocation Patent invalidity—obviousness Patent invalidity—lack of novelty Claim construction/scope To assess validity and/or infringement, the court must interpret the patent claims—ie ascertain their meaning and extent. For further guidance on claim construction, see Practice Note: Patent infringement—Claim construction/scope...

What is meant by ‘personalised medicines’? The expression ‘personalised medicine’, sometimes called ‘targeted medicine’, commonly refers to therapies aimed at rare conditions. As outlined in this Practice Note, these medicines often involve small‑molecule products repositioned for fresh indications or for subsets of existing patient cohorts that share a predictive biomarker of disease. They can also be biological medicines characterised by functional attributes. Such products present distinct challenges for securing patents and for patent enforcement, some of which are yet to be determined by the English courts. This Practice Note also sets out the limits of patent protection and supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) for these approaches, and signposts other rights relevant to research in this field, including the protection afforded by data and market exclusivity. What are rare diseases? Rare diseases are conditions that affect a small minority of the population. In the US, a rare disease is defined by the Orphan Drug Act as a disease or condition affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US. In...