Patentability and Interference Risk of the SOSA Approach

According to the European Patent Convention (EPC), chemical compounds (or mixtures/compositions) can be patented if they are new (novelty), if inventive step is involved, and if they are industrially applicable [42]. For example, a new chemical compound is always inventive if unexpected effects are implicated when industrially applied. With an increasingly broad and more general definition of the symbols and substituents used in the MAR-KUSH formula [43,44], the use of parameters and functional features in patent applications, even the straightforward assessment of novelty [45] of compound claims, is rendered difficult. 

However, more difficult than novelty is a unified, clear, and objective assessment of the inventive step. The original idea was, that not every new but logically deducible obvious modification of the state of the art, which would occur to the skilled person as a simple further development of his or her daily routine worlt, should be protected automatically pursuant to its mere novelty. The third and last requirement, industrial applicability, does as a rule not raise any problem when assessing the patentability of biologically active compounds. 

if you look through a copy of a journal referring to biologically/phar-macologically active compounds in the broadest sense, one will have diiSculty in finding an article not referring to structure-activity relationships. The correlations between molecular structure and (biological) activity are one of the most fundamental principles of modern medicinal and pharmaceutical chemistry and as such represent the basis for their industrial applicability. 

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