Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure | |
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Signed | 28 April 1977 |
Location | Budapest, Hungary |
Effective | 19 August 1980 |
Condition | ratification by five States [1] |
Parties | 89 [2] |
Depositary | Director-General of WIPO [3] |
Language | English, French [4] |
The Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure, or Budapest Treaty, is an international treaty signed in Budapest, Hungary, on April 28, 1977. It entered into force on August 19, 1980, [5] and was later amended on September 26, 1980. The treaty is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
The Budapest Treaty concerns a specific topic in the international patent process: microorganisms. All states party to the Treaty are obliged to recognize microorganisms deposited as a part of the patent procedure, irrespective of where the depository authority is located. In practice this means that the requirement to submit microorganisms to each and every national authority in which patent protection is sought no longer exists.
As of December 2023, 89 countries are party to the Budapest Treaty. [2] The accession to the Treaty is open to States party to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property of 1883. The African Regional Industrial Property Organization (ARIPO), the Eurasian Patent Organization (EAPO) and the European Patent Organisation (EPO) have filed a declaration of acceptance under Article 9(1)(a) [6] of the Treaty.
The treaty allows "deposits of microorganisms at an international depositary authority to be recognized for the purposes of patent procedure". [7] Usually, in order to meet the legal requirement of sufficiency of disclosure, patent applications and patents must disclose in their description the subject-matter of the invention in a manner sufficiently clear and complete to be carried out by the person skilled in the art (see also: reduction to practice). When an invention involves a microorganism, completely describing said invention in the description to enable third parties to carry it out is usually impossible. This is why, in the particular case of inventions involving microorganisms, a deposit of biological material must be made in a recognised institution. The Budapest Treaty ensures that an applicant, i.e. a person who applies for a patent, needs not to deposit the biological material in all countries where he/she wants to obtain a patent. The applicant needs only to deposit the biological material at one recognised institution, and this deposit will be recognised in all countries party to the Budapest Treaty.
The deposits are made at an international depositary authority (IDA) in accordance with the rules of the Treaty on or before the filing date of the complete patent application. Article 7 of the Budapest treaty outlines the requirements for a facility to become an International Depositary Authority. As of July 23, 2018, there were 47 IDAs in approximately 25 countries worldwide. [7] On April 25, 2024, there were 50 such authorities: seven in the United Kingdom, four in the Republic of Korea, three in China, India, Italy, Poland and the United States of America, two each in Australia, Japan, the Russian Federation and Spain, and one each in Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands (Kingdom of the), Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland. [8]
IDA's have accepted deposits for biological materials which do not fall within a literal interpretation of "microorganism". The Treaty does not define what is meant by "microorganism."
The range of materials able to be deposited under the Budapest Treaty includes:
There are many types of expression systems: bacterial; yeast; viral; plant or animal cell cultures;
The World Intellectual Property Organization is one of the 15 specialized agencies of the United Nations (UN). Pursuant to the 1967 Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO was created to promote and protect intellectual property (IP) across the world by cooperating with countries as well as international organizations. It began operations on 26 April 1970 when the convention entered into force. The current Director General is Singaporean Daren Tang, former head of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, who began his term on 1 October 2020.
Ida or IDA may refer to:
As with all utility patents in the United States, a biological patent provides the patent holder with the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, or importing the claimed invention or discovery in biology for a limited period of time - for patents filed after 1998, 20 years from the filing date.
Sufficiency of disclosure or enablement is a patent law requirement that a patent application disclose a claimed invention in sufficient detail so that the person skilled in the art could carry out that claimed invention. The requirement is fundamental to patent law: a monopoly is granted for a given period of time in exchange for a disclosure to the public how to make or practice the invention.
ATCC or the American Type Culture Collection is a nonprofit organization which collects, stores, and distributes standard reference microorganisms, cell lines and other materials for research and development. Established in 1925 to serve as a national center for depositing and distributing microbiological specimens, ATCC has since grown to distribute in over 150 countries. It is now the largest general culture collection in the world.
Intellectual property law in Romania has developed significantly in the period since the Romanian Revolution of 1989 because of the need to enforce various regional and international treaties and agreements, such as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the European Directives on Biotechnological Inventions, on Trademarks and Geographical Indications, and on Supplementary protection certificates, the Trademark Law Treaty, the Patent Law Treaty, and the European Union regulation on the Community Trademark, and the need to harmonize domestic patent law with the European Patent Convention (EPC) and with the European Union.
A patent application is a request pending at a patent office for the grant of a patent for an invention described in the patent specification and a set of one or more claims stated in a formal document, including necessary official forms and related correspondence. It is the combination of the document and its processing within the administrative and legal framework of the patent office.
The World Federation for Culture Collections is an international body formed under the umbrella of the International Union of Biological Sciences and a Federation within the International Union of Microbiological Societies. The WFCC operates as a clearing house for information on collections of microbiological specimens. It supports the development, maintenance and establishment of culture collections. The WFCC bylaws were published in 1972 in the International Journal of Systematic Biology and updated several times since.
A biorepository is a facility that collects, catalogs, and stores samples of biological material for laboratory research. Biorepositories collect and manage specimens from animals, plants, and other living organisms. Biorepositories store many different types of specimens, including samples of blood, urine, tissue, cells, DNA, RNA, and proteins. If the samples are from people, they may be stored with medical information along with written consent to use the samples in laboratory studies.
The Leibniz Institute DSMZ - German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH, located in Braunschweig, is a research infrastructure in the Leibniz Association. Also the DSMZ is the world's most diverse collection of bioresources. These include microorganisms as well as more than 840 human and animal cell cultures, over 1,500 plant viruses, over 940 bacteriophages, and 250 plasmids. Since 2010, the scientific director of the Leibniz Institute DSMZ has been Jörg Overmann, a microbiologist with a PhD from the University of Konstanz. He holds a professorship in microbiology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. Since August 2018, he has led the institute with leadership with Bettina Fischer as administrative director.
The NATO Agreement for the mutual safeguarding of secrecy of inventions relating to defence and for which applications for patents have been made was signed in Paris on September 21, 1960. It entered into force on January 12, 1961, following deposit of the instruments of ratification by the first two countries, namely the United States and Norway.
The Belgian Co-ordinated Collections of Micro-organisms (BCCM) is a Belgian government funded consortium of seven scientific institutions, who manage and exploit a collection of microbial and genetic resources. The consortium comprises more than 269,000 publicly available strains of bacteria including mycobacteria and cyanobacteria, filamentous fungi, yeasts, diatoms and plasmids.
The National Collection of Yeast Cultures (NCYC) is a British yeast culture collection based at the Norwich Research Park in Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom, that currently maintains a collection of over 4400 strains and operates under the Budapest Treaty.
Molecular cloning is a set of experimental methods in molecular biology that are used to assemble recombinant DNA molecules and to direct their replication within host organisms. The use of the word cloning refers to the fact that the method involves the replication of one molecule to produce a population of cells with identical DNA molecules. Molecular cloning generally uses DNA sequences from two different organisms: the species that is the source of the DNA to be cloned, and the species that will serve as the living host for replication of the recombinant DNA. Molecular cloning methods are central to many contemporary areas of modern biology and medicine.
The Microbial Culture Collection is a microbial culture collection centre in Pune, India. The facility acts as a national depository, supplying authentic microbial cultures and providing related services to research institutions, universities, industries and the scientific community in general. It is funded by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).
The Spanish Bank of Algae is a national R&D service attached to the Marine Biotechnology Center of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), which objectives are the isolation, identification, characterization, conservation and provisioning of microalgae and cyanobacteria. It was previously known as the National Bank of Algae (BNA).
Patent law in Aruba is mainly governed by the Patents Regulation, the law governing the Aruban patent. The Dutch government indicated in 2007, that the patent regulation was, to a large extent identical to the Rijksoctrooiwet.
Republic Act No. 8293, otherwise known as The Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines lays down the rules and regulations that grant, and enforce patents in the Philippines. Patents may be granted to technical solutions such as an inventions, machines, devices, processes, or an improvement of any of the foregoing. The technical solution must be novel, innovative, and industrially useful. In order for a technical solution to be granted a patent, the inventor must file an application to the Bureau of Patents, which will examine, and in some cases, grant its approval. The law is designed as to foster domestic creativity, to attract foreign investors, and to motivate inventors to release their products for public access.
The National Collection of Industrial, Food and Marine Bacteria (NCIMB) is a culture collection in the United Kingdom consisting of microorganisms from environmental samples as well as bacteria involved in the production or spoilage of food and drink, and bacteria with important industrial properties. It is a large reference collection and has over 10,000 deposits. Deposits to the collection can be made for research purposes, or for inclusion into patent submissions.