Please join CIPLA for a discussion, lead by Professor Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Director, IP and Information Law Program, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, on:  Has the PTAB Made a Difference in Drug Settlements and Generic Entry?


Event Details


The Connecticut Intellectual Property Law Association (CIPLA) is pleased to announce its next meeting in the 2022-2023 schedule. 

Has the PTAB Made a Difference in Drug Settlements and Generic Entry? 

Please join us for a presentation on this topic, facilitated by Professor Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Director, IP and Information Law Program, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.   

Presentation Summary

Contrary to expectations, the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) does not seem to be helping expedite market entry for generic drug makers.  Using the well-established Hatch-Waxman framework, generics can and do challenge patents on brand-name drugs through district court litigation to enter the market sooner.  When the system of administrative PTAB trials was enacted in 2011, it was widely hailed as a cheaper, faster, and more expert alternative to court litigation across all technologies.  The expectation—and, for some, the concern—was that the PTAB process might disrupt the existing Hatch-Waxman balance.  New empirical research, however, suggests that the PTAB has not proven to have any significant effect on generic drug entry.  This presentation will discuss and explain these findings.

The meeting will be held on Wednesday, May 24, 2023 at The Elm City Club in New Haven, from 6 to 9 PM, including a cocktail hour from 6 to 7 PM.

About Professor Vishnubhakat

Professor Vishnubhakat’s research has been cited in federal appellate and trial court opinions, agency reports and rulemaking, and over two dozen Supreme Court briefs. His work has been published in leading law journals including the Washington & Lee Law Review and Iowa Law Review, in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Law and the Biosciences and the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and in the intellectual property and technology journals of the Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, and Duke law schools. His first book, A Tort Theory of Patent Litigation: History and Reform, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Until 2022, Vishnubhakat was a professor at Texas A&M University, where he held tenured appointments in the School of Law and the Dwight Look College of Engineering and guest-lectured in the Mays Business School. Before coming to Texas A&M, he served in the United States Patent and Trademark Office as principal legal advisor to that agency’s first two chief economists. He was also a faculty fellow at the Duke Law School, where he co-taught patent law, and was a postdoctoral associate at the Duke Center for Public Genomics, where he researched law and policy issues surrounding innovation in genetics and biomedicine.

Professor Vishnubhakat holds a J.D. and LL.M. in intellectual property from the University of New Hampshire School of Law, formerly the Franklin Pierce Law Center, where he was an editor of the Law Review. He also holds a B.S. in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is admitted to the bars of Texas, Illinois, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the Supreme Court of the United States.

This research was jointly conducted with Professors Arti Rai (Duke University School of Law), Jorge Lemus (University of Illinois Department of Economics), and Erik Hovenkamp (University of Southern California Gould School of Law), and was supported by grant funding from Arnold Ventures.

Please RSVP by Tuesday, May 23, 2023 on the CIPLA website or by emailing CIPLA Program Chair T. David Bomzer at tdbomzer@cantorcolburn.com