Technoglitch
Core Member
India scored an important success when it fully protected its traditional knowledge by stalling a leading UK-based laboratory's move to patent a medicinal composition containing turmeric, pine bark and green tea for treating hair loss. The move comes just days after India foiled a similar attempt by US-based consumer goods giant Colgate-Palmolive from patenting a mouthwash formula containing herbal extracts.
The vigilance of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) helped protect the Indian products as the council in its submission to the European Patent Office managed to prove that turmeric, pine bark and green tea were being used as a treatment for hair loss in Indian systems of medicine like Ayurveda and Unani since ancient times.
The UK-based company - Pangaea Laboratories Limited - had filed the patent application in February, 2011. The CSIR-TKDL unit had, however, objected to it and filed evidence on January 13, 2014 once the patent application got published in the European Patent Office website.
India wins patent war on hair loss formula - The Times of India
The vigilance of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) helped protect the Indian products as the council in its submission to the European Patent Office managed to prove that turmeric, pine bark and green tea were being used as a treatment for hair loss in Indian systems of medicine like Ayurveda and Unani since ancient times.
The UK-based company - Pangaea Laboratories Limited - had filed the patent application in February, 2011. The CSIR-TKDL unit had, however, objected to it and filed evidence on January 13, 2014 once the patent application got published in the European Patent Office website.
India wins patent war on hair loss formula - The Times of India