USV gets US patent on new way to make ropinirole

The Mumbai-based USV Ltd. has obtained US patent to a new way to make ropinirole, an active ingredient in GlaxoSmithKline's Parkinson's disease drug Requip.Requip has US sales of over US $500 million per year. GlaxoSmithKline's patents expire this spring, opening the market to a host of new, lower-cost generic products.To prepare for this, a team of researchers at Mumbai-based USV Limited developed a way to make ropinirole with a higher purity, and at a lower cost, than had previously been known. The US Patent Office has just ruled that USV is entitled to exclusive US rights to this invention. The US Patent Office decided that USV's patent application, Serial No. 10/888,901, is also entitled to a full scope of expanded coverage under a US legal doctrine known as the Doctrine of Equivalents. This is significant because such expanded coverage is currently accorded to only a small fraction of US patents, said a press statement from Pharmaceutical Patent Attorneys, LLC.