InFocus: Life Sciences & Healthcare newsletter - July 2008

10-Jul-2008  |  Life Sciences & Healthcare

Our life sciences and healthcare team celebrate the 20th issue of InFocus. In the last four and a half years since our first issue in April 2004, we have commented on many of the most significant cases, legislative and regulatory changes affecting the life sciences and healthcare sector including the changes to the regulatory framework for medicinal products in Europe to which we dedicated an issue in November 2005.

Click here for InFocus - July 2008

In this celebratory issue we include comment on:

of anti-trust legislation

  • the proposed changes to the regulation of medical devices
  • the ABPI Code of Practice - 50 years on and still changing
  • the Advanced Therapy Regulation - new guidance
  • new Human Tissue Authority licence requirements
  • cybrids and the new HFEA
  • how changes to UK tax laws are making it prudent for companies to reconsider their tax bases
  • new laws on unfair commercial practices and how they will affect companies in the healthcare and life science sectors
  • the grant of an interim injunction to Eli Lilly in the German Olanzapine patent litigation
  • the European Commission's recommendations on private actions for breaches

We also include comment from our guest author Ruprecht Hermans of Brinkhof on the recent reference by the Dutch court to the European Court of Justice on the scope of Article 9 of the Biotechnology Directive.   

We hope that you continue to find our updates useful and informative. In future editions this year we will comment on the long awaited EBA decision in WARF on the patentability of human embryonic stem cells. We discussed this case in our February 2007 issue. We are also planning a special issue on the new regulatory regime for advanced therapy products, which applies from December this year.

Lawyers Helen Cline, Tim Worden, Robert Vidal, Nikol Davies, Timothy Pinto, Edward Vickers, Kathryn Clapp