Art. 53 (a) EPC indicates, that patents shall not be granted to inventions the commercial exploitation of which would be contrary to ordre public or morality. In addition, according to this provision, such exploitation shall not be deemed to be so contrary merely because it is prohibited by law or regulation in some or all of the member states of the European Patent Organisation. Although there are not many decisions of the European Patent Office (EPO) concerning the Art. 53 (a) EPC, the existing ones show, that there is no consensus on the tests and standards suitable for assessing the commercial exploitation of inventions with regard to this provision. Thus, the interpretation and the application of the Art. 53 (a) EPC to inventions, in particular, to the biotechnological ones, are difficult to predict. All this is a problem, because the protection of legitimate expectations, legal certainty and legal security is not guaranteed for those whose interests are influenced by patents. This situation adversely affects the competitiveness of business entities and research organisations as well as the public access to the results of scientific progress reducing the support for granting exclusive rights to specific inventions, the confidence in the benefits of the entire patent system and its transparency in the eyes of the inventors, developers and others who rely on it. The goal of the project is to address this issue by revealing the relationship between the European patent law as a part of the Western legal tradition and biomedical sciences as a tradition, when, based on the Art. 53 (a) EPC, decisions on the granting of European patents to the biotechnological inventions are being made, and to evaluate the impact of this relationship on the protection of these inventions in the European patent system. This is achieved by: a) analysing the EPO case law on the granting of patents to biotechnological inventions and identifying the tests, standards and relevant categories employed in the interpretation and application of the Art. 53 (a) EPC; b) analysing the concept of the biomedical sciences as a tradition and identifying the significance of this concept for the relationship between the European patent law and biomedical sciences; c) analysing the contemporary concept of the Western legal tradition and identifying its main features; d) analysing the concepts of ordre public and morality as well as their interrelationship in the EPO case law and in the Western legal tradition; e) analysing the economic implications of the application of the Art. 53 (a) EPC and their influence on the progress of biomedical sciences; f) identifying the peculiarities of the relationship between the European patent law as a part of the Western legal tradition and biomedical sciences as a tradition in the context of the Art. 53 (a) EPC and evaluating the influence of this relationship on the protection of biotechnological inventions in the European patent system.
