Biography
James Horgan is Assistant Managing Counsel at Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA. He heads the European Patent Department based in London. He has a degree in chemistry and has practiced extensively in the pharmaceutical, vaccine and biotechnological fields for 25 years supporting research sites in England and Italy. He has wide experience of prosecuting applications before the EPO where he appears in ex parte and inter partes Oral Proceedings. He has filed and prosecuted a large number of SPCs. He has been involved in major multi-jurisdictional litigation in cases relating to Vioxx, Fosamax, Cosopt, Propecia, Rebetol, Isentress, Inegy and Janumet with major successes before the Dutch, Irish and Malaysian Supreme Courts in cases relating to second medical use claims, the standards for preliminary injunctions and the judicial assessment of subclaims, as well as before the CJEU and EFTA courts in cases relating to parallel imports and negative term SPCs. He has two ongoing CJEU cases which relate to the interplay of Artr 3(a) and (c) of the SPC Regulation. He is involved in IP policy issues via the IP Federation, where he was President in 2017-18, EFPIA and IFPMA and regularly provides input to the UK government and EU bodies. He is one of Managing Intellectual Property’s Corporate IP Stars.