Cases

Altius’ cases in Biotech & Life Sciences

• ALTIUS represents Bayer before the Brussels courts in relation to its patent protection for drospirenone (used in birth control pills). The summary proceedings led to a decision of the Brussels Court of Appeal granting our client the requested preliminary measures, provisionally prohibiting the marketing of generic products which infringed our client’s patent, some directly and some by equivalence. The main proceedings are still pending before the same court.
• ALTIUS represents ESA and AIC as interveners in a number of annulment proceedings initiated by Bayer Cropscience, Syngenta and BASF against a set of Commission Implementing Regulations restricting both the use of certain pesticides (two neonicotinoids and fipronil) for seed treatment (and other uses) and the use and commercialisation of seeds treated with those products, because of the alleged impact of the substances on the decline of honeybee populations.
• ALTIUS represents Belgian’s world leading sugar beet producer SES Vanderhave in plant variety annulment proceedings before the EU General Court.
• ALTIUS acted for Mitsui Ventures Global Fund in relation to a capital investment round of Promethera Biosciences, which is a Belgian clinical stage pharmaceutical company that develops innovative therapies for the treatment of liver diseases with no effective therapeutic cure.
• ALTIUS represents a consortium of innovative plant breeding companies from Germany and The Netherlands (including KWS Saat, Selecta Klemm, Limgroup and Agrico – to name but a few of the 33 companies joining the action) in proceedings before the General Court of the European Union in an annulment action against Regulation 511/2014. This Regulation forms a partial implementation of the so-called Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity. That Protocol puts in place access and benefit-sharing (ABS) rules for companies involved in the bio-prospecting of genetic resources. The contested Regulation, however, only imposes compliance measures on European companies that conduct R&D on the basis of such genetic resources. The applicants in this action argue that the manner in which this is done not only violates a number of basic principles of EU law, but also reduces biodiversity (instead of protecting it) and restricts the so-called “breeders’ exemption”, which lies at the basis of plant variety rights law as it was enshrined in the UPOV Convention and the European legislation on the Union Plant Variety Right.