Each year the European Patent Office (EPO) grants about 100,000 patents. Of these about 2-3% are opposed – meaning that a third party has formally filed a request that the EPO revoke the patent. This request, known as an opposition, must be backed up by evidence and arguments explaining why the patent is invalid. Oppositions can, in effect, be filed anonymously – this is usually achieved by the representative attorney filing the opposition in their own name, or that of a vehicle company.
We can gauge opposition activity in several ways. One is by identifying the patents that received the highest numbers of oppositions, indicating that these patents cover particularly commercially valuable technologies (2024 list here). Another way of looking at opposition activity is to look at which companies had the highest numbers of patents that received at least one opposition (2024 list here).
But neither of these approaches gives a full picture of the total burden of new oppositions that certain companies are faced with each year. The scale of an opposition case for a particular patent can vary vastly, and some companies are targeted more frequently than others.
The chart below offers a snapshot of opposition activity in 2024. It shows which companies were dealing with the greatest number of new oppositions, both in terms of oppositions per patent and opposed patents per company.
By this measure, Regeneron was the most active defendant for 2024. A total of 38 oppositions were filed against nine of their patents. (You can zoom in on Regeneron in the chart by clicking on its name.)
At a glance we can also see that Boehringer Ingelheim and Novartis each own patents that attracted a very unusually high number of oppositions (18 and 16 respectively), as well as several others that received lower – but still significant – numbers of revocation requests.
By contrast, companies like Unilever and BASF (shown in blue in the chart) held very high numbers of opposed patents, but, these were typically opposed by only one party. A similar pattern can be seen for many companies operating in in the next-generation nicotine products space (shown in green).
Finally, using the drop-down menu in the chart you can explore how these companies are choosing to engage with the Unitary Patent system and the Unitary Patent Court (UPC). The majority of patents shown have been granted as “classic” European patents for which an opt-out from UPC jurisdiction has been filed. However, at the time of writing, one of these opt-outs has since been withdrawn – for Regeneron’s EP3536712, which relates to PCSK9 inhibitors and became the subject of a notable UPC decision on second medical use claims (read more here).
