Recently, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court issued the Administrative Judgment No. (2024) Jing 73 Xing Chu 8173 in the case of a holding company v. the National Intellectual Property Administration and the third party Nanjing Spark Pharmaceutical Technology Co., Ltd., involving an administrative dispute over the invalidation of an invention patent right. The court upheld the Decision No. 564902 on the Request for Invalidation Review made by the National Intellectual Property Administration and dismissed the plaintiff's claims.

The key points of the judgment in this case are as follows: 1. With regard to whether the technology constitutes prior art, it is necessary to consider whether the relevant technical content was publicly available before the filing date. Where the fact to be proved by the involved experimental data was publicly available before the filing date, the availability before the filing date shall not be denied merely because the public actually obtained such content after the filing date. The criterion for accepting experimental data formed after the filing date shall be whether the public could obtain the technical effect of the prior art to be proved by the involved experimental data before the filing date of the patent. As for "availability", there are usually two scenarios: one is that it is clearly recorded in the reference document used for comparison as prior art; the other is that although it is not clearly recorded in the reference document, it can be obtained by a person skilled in the art before the filing date of the patent based on the content disclosed in the prior art and common general knowledge in the field. 2. The criterion for determining whether experimental data formed after the filing date is admissible depends on the facts to be proved by the involved experimental data. Different facts to be proved have their respective criteria and bases, which are not comparable with each other. 3. For a person skilled in the art, the approach to improving the structure-activity relationship of a compound usually involves considering the modification sites and replaceable groups. If, based on the prior art, there are numerous rather than limited modification sites and replaceable groups, making it difficult for a person skilled in the art to predict the technical effect after modification, the structure-activity relationship of the modified compound can generally be regarded as non-obvious; otherwise, it is obvious.

Beijing Caihe Law Firm was entrusted by Nanjing Spark Pharmaceutical Technology Co., Ltd. to act as the agent for the third party in the aforementioned case.