Drug repurposing and the prior art patents of competitors

Drug repurposing (i.e., finding novel indications for established substances) has received increasing attention in industry recently. One challenge of repositioned drugs is obtaining effective patent protection, especially if the 'novel' indications have already been claimed by competitors within the same drug class. Here, I report the case of patents relating to phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5) inhibitors. Patentees of later-filed patents on novel indications (even when they could not observe prior patenting of their direct competitors) filed patents for which patent examiners did not see the prior-filed patents of the competitors as relevant prior art, whereas these follower patent applications often failed because of other reasons.