On the morning of 25 July 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union (the CJEU) handed down judgment in Case C-121/17 Teva UK and Others v Gilead concerning the validity of Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC) protection for Gilead’s combination HIV treatment TRUVADA (tenofovir disoproxil and emtricitabine). The CJEU held that an SPC can only be granted for a product if, in the basic patent on which the SPC is sought, that product “is either expressly mentioned in the claims of that patent or those claims relate to that product necessarily and specifically.” It is for the English High Court, as the referring court, to determine whether that test is met by Gilead’s patent in this case; however, the CJEU stated (on the basis of the information provided by the referring court) that it does not seem possible that the combination of tenofovir disoproxil and emtricitabine necessarily falls under the invention covered by Gilead’s patent.
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