| Summary: | - 61 - 7. Resume - Patent protection of pharmaceuticals and its current problems The pharmaceutical industry nowadays plays a major role in the world's economy, having an estimated total volume of USD 740 billion and being one of the recognized key innovation sectors. The system of patent law is of major significance to the industry in that the monopoly it confers, for a limited period of time, on using innovations provides a major incentive for innovative research activities that the industry is involved in. Although the availability of patent protection for chemical and pharmaceutical products has, from a historical perspective, only been reaffirmed in the near past, it has nowadays been accepted as a global standard mainly through the provisions of the WTO's TRIPS agreement. Despite the existence of various international treaties harmonizing patent laws, patents have to date in their effects remained strictly limited to individual jurisdictions. There're several ways of how patents can be used to protect the novel, innovative and non-obvious results of pharmaceutical research; patents for end products, processes of making a product or for new medical indications can mainly be of practical use, each of these types providing a different scope of protection and offering different approaches of preventing...
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