PharmaCyte Biotech Will Have All the Protection It Needs for Pancreatic Cancer Treatment Upon Marketing Approval

NEW YORK, NY, Feb. 04, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PharmaCyte Biotech (OTCQB: PMCB) is about to embark upon a planned U.S. FDA Phase 2b clinical trial to treat locally advanced, inoperable pancreatic cancer (LAPC) at trial sites all over the United States, and with that journey comes the need to keep its signature technology, Cell-in-a-Box, protected should it one day receive marketing approval from drug regulatory agencies in the U.S. and Europe.  PharmaCyte’s Cell-in-a-Box technology for the treatment of pancreatic cancer is certainly protected well into the future if/when it does receive the coveted marketing approval it’s striving for upon the completion of clinical trials.

Currently, PharmaCyte is revamping its provisional patent application and its strategy related to full patent protection.  The idea is to present the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) with an acceptable provisional patent application that protects its therapy to treat cancerous tumors, including the therapy that will be used in its upcoming clinical trial in LAPC. 

Provisional patent applications are a way to establish and protect a “date of invention” or “priority filing date” for one year.  The provisional patent application was created to provide inventors with a way to begin protecting their inventions, and an approved provisional patent application will provide PharmaCyte 12 months to prepare a full patent application.  This approach will offer the company an opportunity to establish an early effective filing date for a patent.

A provisional patent—and eventually a full patent—would give PharmaCyte a fresh 20 years of patent protection; however, even without it, PharmaCyte has protections in place to protect its technology that are in line with any biotechnology/pharmaceutical company developing treatments after many years.  In most cases, the 20-year patent protection that biotechnology/pharmaceutical companies have in place while developing drugs/treatments, have their 20-year time frame cut in half to 10 years by the time the drug hits the marketplace. 

Patents are typically awarded within a few years after the patent application submission, but a common misconception is that the patent begins only after the drug hits the market, so with this in mind, PharmaCyte will actually have longer protections in place than most biotechnology/pharmaceutical companies have upon marketing approval after years of development.