Company: HMDCF
Filing Date: 2025-03-19
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001410578-25-000377
Chunk: 218

Company: HUTCHMED (China) Ltd
Filing Date: 2025-03-19
Form: 20-F
Item: Item 1
Chunk 218
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 with other pharmaceutical companies, our or our joint ventures’ ability to maintain and solidify our proprietary and intellectual property position for our drugs and drug candidates or our or their products and technologies will depend on our or our joint ventures’ success in obtaining effective patent claims and enforcing those claims if granted. However, our or our joint ventures’ pending patent applications and any patent applications that we or they may in the future file or license from third parties may not result in the issuance of patents. We also cannot predict the breadth of claims that may be allowed or enforced in our or our joint ventures’ patents. Any issued patents that we may receive in the future may be challenged, invalidated or circumvented. For example, we cannot be certain of the priority of filing covered by pending third-party patent applications. If third parties prepare and file patent applications in the United States, China, Europe, Japan or other markets that also claim technology or therapeutics to which we or our joint ventures have rights, we or our joint ventures may have to participate in interference proceedings, which could result in substantial costs to us, even if the eventual outcome is favorable to us, which is highly unpredictable. In addition, because of the extensive time required for clinical development and regulatory review of a drug candidate we may develop, it is possible that, before any of our drug candidates can be commercialized, any related patent may expire or remain in force for only a short period following commercialization, thereby limiting protection such patent would afford the respective product and any competitive advantage such patent may provide.

Table of Contents

Trade Secrets

In addition to patents, we and our joint ventures rely upon unpatented trade secrets and know-how and continuing technological innovation to develop and maintain our or their competitive position. We and our joint ventures seek to protect our proprietary information, in part, by executing confidentiality agreements with our collaborators and scientific advisors, and non-competition, non-solicitation, confidentiality, and invention assignment agreements with our employees and consultants. We and our joint ventures have also executed agreements requiring assignment of inventions with selected scientific advisors and collaborators. The confidentiality agreements we and our joint ventures enter into are designed to protect our or our joint ventures’ proprietary information and the agreements or clauses requiring assignment of inventions to us or our joint ventures, as applicable, are designed to grant us or our joint ventures, as applicable, ownership of technologies that are developed through our or their relationship with the respective counterpart. We cannot guarantee, however, that these agreements will afford us or our joint ventures adequate protection of our or their intellectual property