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China and the United States are fighting to find an effective vaccine to put an end to this enormous health, social and economic challenge.
China and the United States are fighting for the premiere of the vaccine against the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes the Covid-19 pneumonia that has killed almost 8.000 people in the world, a time trial in which they are not the only ones in the running. , the European Union (EU) also competes.
The first to obtain an effective vaccine that puts an end to this enormous health, social and economic challenge will achieve global recognition, but also a very valuable patent.
This hotbed in the scientific world has begun to be noticed at the European Patent Office (EPO), where the first patent applications for drugs against the coronavirus have already arrived, but they are still "very few" and "secret," its Communication spokesperson, Luis Berenguer, tells Efe, who refuses to specify the "exact content" or who its depositors are.
What they can say is that they have detected "greater interest" in these patents due to the questions they receive and the searches that are carried out through official mechanisms in the EPO database, says Berenguer, who until the end of last year He was Director of Communication at the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).
It specifies that patents for viruses of the “corona” family have been requested since the 90s of the 2003th century, then for veterinary purposes, and that there were increases in 2014 and XNUMX in this type of applications due to the flu crisis. avian and Asian.
From the late 90s to date, the EPO has received some 390 applications, of which it has registered 152 patents, 15 of them from the Higher Council for Scientific Research of Spain, according to Berenguer.
