By John Bringardner
IP Law & Business/November 2007

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Hosur Road, the traffic-choked artery connecting Bangalore to its tech-heavy suburb Electronics City, is lined with the gleaming modern campuses of multinational and local companiesÑand the occasional cow. International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are near the headquarters for Wipro Ltd. and Infosys Technologies Ltd., two of India's largest IT firms. Biocon, Ltd., India's largest biotech company, has a much more modest building down the road. But thanks to the country's 2005 Patents Amendment Act, that may soon change.

By allowing product patents on pharmaceuticals, India not only opened itself to investment from multinational drug companies, it realigned business plans for its own thriving generics industry. "There were remarkable changes under the compulsion of TRIPS," says Anindya Sircar, Biocon's head of IP, referring to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights that India signed when it joined the World Trade Organization in 1995. Biocon began life in 1978 as a generics company, but in 2001 it launched its own research and development into innovative drugs. Then, in 2006, Biocon bought Nobex Corporation, a bankrupt U.S. company that specialized in proprietary oral delivery systems, in order to gain access to its 300 patents and patent applications. Biocon is using the IP to help develop its own oral insulin molecule, which could give diabetics worldwide an alternative to daily injections.

Sircar says that Biocon plans to phase out its generics completely within the next six to eight years, all because of product patents. The company now has more than 100 granted patents worldwide, with more than 800 pending applications. Sircar says he now files all new patent applications in India first, then internationally through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

In a small bungalow across the street from the prestigious Indian Institute of Science in central Bangalore, bioinformatics company Strand Life Sciences launched its own patent effort in response to India's new rules. Abhijit Parkhe is the company's marketing officer, but he's also the de facto patent officer, having taught himself how to file PCT applications. Parkhe says Strand was a service-based company for its first three years, conducting basic research for Big Pharma via computer simulation. Encouraged by India's new patent laws to move up the value chain, the company began creating proprietary software. It now has one joint patent with Syngene, a Biocon subsidiary, and several pending applications. Parkhe says the shift is happening across Bangalore as companies move from low-cost services to selling innovation. "If you claim to be a high-tech company, you have to show patents," he says. What's next for Bangalore's new innovators? How about a method for dissolving traffic?