The European Patent Office (EPO) has recently been reported to have cancelled its intent to grant patent on a melon extract formulation for the treatment of Leucoderma to a Spanish company, because the treatment method is a part of Indian traditional knowledge. The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) compiled by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), documents over two lakh medical formulations of Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani and 200 yoga postures to save them from piracy and mentions the use of melon extract to cure vitiligo under the Unani system of medicine. The Unani hakeems have for long been using the extract to cure the disease as evidenced by the literature provided to the EPO.

The TKDL database has been translated into English, Spanish, German, French and Japanese to facilitate the international examiners as the knowledge originally existed in Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil. The Indian Government entered into a three-year agreement  with the EPO w.e.f 3rd February 2009, to make the TKDL database available to patent examiners at the EPO (from all 34 member states) “for establishing prior art”, in case of patent applications based on Indian Systems of Medicine.

The TKDL has also incorporated the Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification (TKRC), an innovative structured classification system to further the purpose of systematic arrangement, dissemination and retrieval. This classification has incorporated close to 25,000 subgroups against the few subgroups that were available in the earlier version of the International Patent Classification (IPC) engulfing in its ambit medicinal plants, minerals, animal resources, effects and diseases, methods of preparations, mode of administration and so on.

According to the news reports, the Spanish company Perdix group SL had applied for a patent on anti-vitiligo cream (Patent no. EP1747786) in July 2006. The EPO verified the TKDL documents to ascertain that there already existed a prior art. Indian authorities also provided Unani books to the EPO that mention the use of the technique in cure of the ailment. Upon verification, the EPO rescinded from its earlier decision of granting the patent to Perdix Group. This case is particularly significant as India was able to prevent this bid to patent its traditional knowledge within three weeks, as against the time taken earlier to challenge the patents on anti-fungal properties of neem, which was ten years, and turmeric which took around three years.

It is expected that the compilation of TKDL would prove instrumental in further negotiations with the international community in preventing biopiracy on Indian herbs and systems of medicine.