5 October 2016Americas

LSIPR 50 2016: David Rosenberg and Jörg Thomaier

Name: David Rosenberg

Organisation: GSK

Position: Vice president of IP policy

David Rosenberg has had a long career in intellectual property law. After achieving his law degree and qualifying as a solicitor, he spent three years conducting legal research and teaching in the US and UK. He has focused his practice primarily on litigation and transactional work for patent matters.

Rosenberg worked at Clifford Chance for 12 years and in 2001 joined GSK, where he engages in a policy role in the IP department. Rosenberg has worked with the UK Intellectual Property Office and the European Commission on IP policy matters inside and outside the EU.

These include providing access to medicines; launching a knowledge pool to facilitate research and development (R&D) of treatments for neglected tropical diseases; and helping with the IP policy of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a public-private partnership which aims to remove the bottlenecks in R&D by conducting pre-competitive collaborative research in Europe using public and pharmaceutical industry resources.

"Rosenberg has worked with the UK Intellectual Property Office and the and the European Commission on IP policy matters."

In 2015, Novartis and GSK agreed a joint venture which saw the former acquire GSK’s oncology products business for $14.5 billion, with a further $1.5 billion available depending on meeting development milestones. Novartis also has opt-in rights to GSK’s oncology R&D pipeline.

Sir Andrew Witty, chief executive of GSK until 2017, said that the Novartis portfolio is “highly complementary to GSK’s”, adding that: “Opportunities to build greater scale and combine high-quality assets in vaccines and consumer healthcare are scarce.”

Name: Jörg Thomaier

Organisation: Bayer

Position: Chief intellectual property counsel

Jörg Thomaier has worked at Bayer since 2004, and has held roles such as chief patent counsel in Bayer Business Services, chief patent counsel in Bayer Healthcare, and chief intellectual property counsel and corporate head of IP. He currently works as chief IP counsel of Bayer Group and managing director of Bayer IP. In his role he handles all aspects of IP including strategy and litigation and has previously focused on patents, licensing and trademarks at the company.

Our sister publication World IP Review spoke to Thomaier in 2013, when he worked as chief IP counsel.

In 2012, the Indian controller of patents issued the country’s first ever compulsory licence, forcing Bayer to license its patented cancer drug Nexavar (sorafenib) to Natco, a local generics company, which could then sell the drug at a lower price.

“The effectiveness of IP rights is a crucial component of long-term economic development."

The controller said that Bayer had not sufficiently “worked the patent in India”, but Thomaier said at the time that “it is important to note that an increase in compulsory licences can be observed in only a limited number of countries”.

“Bayer is committed to enabling access to our innovative products to the largest possible extent. Such efforts can be successful only if multiple partners play an active role,” said Thomaier.

Bayer appealed against the ruling, which enabled Natco to sell the drug at 8,800 rupees ($132) for a month’s dosage instead of the 280,000 rupees charged by Bayer, although the German company was entitled to a 7% royalty from generic sales.

Thomaier was aware that effective IP strategies will be essential in the future: “The effectiveness of IP rights is a crucial component of long-term economic development within these countries and an important incentive to develop new innovative products.”