The Unified Patent Court (UPC) has issued a considerable number of decisions on life sciences matters, including on infringement of medical use claims, inspection and preservation of evidence, provisional measures to prevent the marketing of generic medicinal products, the relevance of patient interests when rendering injunctions, and the scope of the Bolar exception. Three recent decisions from the UPC Court of Appeal (CoA) relevant to life sciences companies are outlined below, addressing claim interpretation, "imminent" patent infringement, and the assessment of "inventive step."

In Alexion Pharmaceuticals v. Samsung Bioepis (UPC_CoA_402/2024), the CoA ruled that a linguistic error, spelling mistake, or any other inaccuracy in a patent claim can (only) be corrected by way of interpretation of the patent claim if the existence of an error and the precise way to correct it are sufficiently certain to the average skilled person on the basis of the patent claim, taking into account the description and the drawings and using common general knowledge. The CoA further established that a patentee's statements during the grant proceedings can be considered when interpreting the patent claim.

In Boehringer Ingelheim v. Zentiva (UPC_CoA_446/2025), the CoA issued an injunction against Zentiva, due to an imminent infringement of Boehringer Ingelheim's patent by Zentiva's generic version of Boehringer's nintedanib. In the CoA's view it was more likely than not that Zentiva had "set the stage" for offering the generic, having completed its preparations for launch, so that the infringement was only a matter of beginning to sell.

In Amgen v. Sanofi-Aventis (UPC_CoA 528/2024), the CoA found that the claimed subject matter was not obvious to the skilled person because there was no reasonable expectation of success to develop the claimed antibody targeting secreted PCSK9 to arrive at an effective treatment of hypercholesterolemia. The CoA's approach in assessing "inventive step" corresponds to the approach of the German Federal Court of Justice (FCJ), and differs from the problem-solution approach of the European Patent Office (EPO), which first determines the closest prior art, and then considers in a second stage the technical effect of the features distinguishing the claimed invention from the closest prior art. In contrast, the CoA considers the technical effect of the entire claimed subject matter in a first stage, and then determines the starting point for the assessment of inventive step in a second stage.