H.Lundbeck A/S, Lundbeck España, S.A. v. Laboratorios Cinfa, S.A., Mylan Pharmaceuticals, S.L., Actavis Spain, SA. et al., Supreme Court (Civil Chamber, 1st Section), Spain, 29 April 2015, Docket No. 556/2013.

By means of a Judgment issued on 29 April 2015, the Supreme Court definitively ruled in the Escitalopram patent litigation brought by Lundbeck in Spain against a pool of generics companies, thereby confirming the earlier findings from the lower courts, which had declared the non-existence of patent infringement.

The Judgment contains important teachings concerning the assessment of patent infringement under the doctrine of equivalents and the applicable standard of obviousness for the alternative which replaces an element of the invention, which the Supreme Court sets in the predictability of the variant. It further analyses the inapplicability of the test of inventive step to appraise the obviousness of the allegedly equivalent alternative.

Read the entire summary (in English) here.

Read the judgment (in Spanish) here.

Head note and summary: Luis Fernández-Novoa, Hoyng Monegier