Unique trademark challenges for pharma

The pharmaceutical industry has some unusual challenges when it comes to gaining registration of trademarks. Robert Reading explains

Robert Reading, CompuMark

The pharmaceutical industry is a significant source oftrademark applications on major trademark registers. Large pharma companies – Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Sanofi, GSK, Pfizer, Merck, Roche – regularly feature on annual lists of top trademark applicants in the US, EU, and worldwide, and typically have trademark portfolios with 10,000-100,000 active records. See table 1.