Talking Life Sciences

In this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast, Mosa Mkhize and Deon Govender discuss Regulatory and policy developments from South Africa: SAHPRA's proposed Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy and its potential impact on license holders for medicines and medical devices

In this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast, Mosa Mkhize and Grant Castle discuss developments in the African Medicines Agency and regulatory convergence.

In this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast, Mosa Mkhize and Roderick Dirkzwager discuss WHO prequalification procedures in Africa.

In this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast, Seán Finan discuss some important recent developments in the regulation of sustainability and green claims and labelling schemes, and the ever-increasing enforcement risk that comes with greenwashing.

In this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast, Marie Doyle-Rossi, Anna Wawrzyniak, and Valeria Sturla discuss the position adopted by the European Parliament on 10 April 2024 on the Commission proposal to reform the core EU pharmaceutical legislation. Parliament's position comes less than a year since the Commission published its proposal, and constitutes a significant step in the legislative process. Although many of the Parliament's amendments to the Commission proposal can be seen as improvements by the innovative industry, many challenges and some unresolved questions remain, especially in relation to the incentive regime. During this audiocast, we therefore discuss improvements, challenges and unresolved questions of the EU Pharma law review, with a particular focus on incentives.

Tune into this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast, where Sibel Yilmaz, Majken Lagerbielke, and Leire Garagorri Eguidazu discuss the new market definition notice published by DG COMP, specifically the latest on the new guidance concerning pharmaceutical innovation markets and possible implications for analysing M&A and licensing deals.

Tune into this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast, where Winsome Cheung and George Jenkins discuss the key trends in Life Sciences Transactions for 2024. The speakers discuss the outlook for deal-making in Life Sciences and predictions for deal trends, including in relation to nuclear medicine, GLP-1, antibody-drug conjugates and other modalities. The speakers also discuss some of the key legal considerations that are coming into increasing focus for Life Sciences Transactions, such as competition/antitrust considerations and the Inflation Reduction Act. This is the first Life Sciences Transactions audiocast for 2024, and we plan to release further audiocasts over the course of this year that dive deeper into some of the above topics.

Recently announced changes to the Voluntary Scheme (VPAG) and Statutory Scheme change the paradigm for the pricing of branded medicines in the UK. Innovative pharmaceutical companies doing business in the UK must decide which scheme to join for 2024 – a decision that may significantly affect margins. Tune into this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast, to hear the latest on these changes from our experts, Grant Castle, Raj Gathani and Daniel Spivey.

Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPCs) are a form of patent term extension right that are available in the EU for medicinal products. Tune into this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast where Inga Pietsch and Roderick Dirkzwager discuss some of the developments in SPC case law from the European Court of Justice in relation to the SPC grant requirement that a product must be protected by a basic patent in force and take a closer look at the Commission's proposal to update the EU SPC regime to introduce a new unitary SPC

Tune into this episode of Covington's Life Sciences Podcast, where Winsome Cheung, Lauren Pignataro Rakitin and Sibel Yilmaz discuss cell and gene therapy collaboration and licensing deals. The speakers discuss the commercial, IP and antitrust issues commonly faced by pharma and biotech companies as they seek to partner in this evolving landscape, and potential ways to address these challenges when structuring and negotiating these transactions.