Dr. Abdul Majeed K. M. Al-Anizi
Associate Professor of Civil Law – Saad Al-Abdullah Academy for Security Sciences – State of Kuwait

Abstract:

The objectives of this research paper are to identify the following: the limits of legal protection provided by the laws and regulations of the State of Kuwait, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for pharmaceutical patents, and the means owned by the state to break the monopoly of those patents when epidemic diseases spread, especially with the increasing demand for Medicines and vaccines due to the emerging corona virus pandemic.
For this purpose, I have followed the analytical descriptive approach to reach the flexibilities in the TRIPS Agreement, which enables the State of Kuwait to import medicines and vaccines, and to import the technology of inventions that enable it to manufacture and produce the vaccines locally, by dividing the research into two sections: the first of them deals with defining the definition of the pharmaceutical patent, its objective conditions, and cases of forfeiture. The second topic, however, deals with the means to reduce the monopoly of pharmaceutical products, and the production of medicines and vaccines locally without obtaining the consent of the owner of the right to the patent.
At the end of the paper, I reached a set of results, most notably the possibility of the State of Kuwait resorting to the principle of international exhaustion, and the possibility of obtaining the medicine at the lowest prices, in addition to the possibility of producing the medicine locally by importing patent technology or resorting to the principle of compulsory licensing.

Keywords: patent, medicine, epidemic diseases, technology transfer, parallel import, compulsory licensing.

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