Thailand: successful challenge to invalid patent claim on antiretrovirals.

Thai people living with HIV/AIDS made legal history on 1 October 2002, when they won a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers-Squibb (BMS). The plaintiffs, two people living with HIV/AIDS and a local NGO, the AIDS Access Foundation, lodged a complaint against BMS and Thailand's Department of Intellectual Property (DIP) in Thailand's Central Intellectual Property and International Trade Court (CIPITC). They claimed that the BMS patent registration for its buffered tablet formulation of the antiretroviral AIDS drug, dideoxy purine nucleoside (ddI, brand name Videx), was illegally amended in an attempt to claim a wider monopoly than the patent description justified.