Company: SRPT
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-029973
Chunk: 219

Company: Sarepta Therapeutics, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 219
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 obtaining, maintaining, or defending our patents. 

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Even when our patent claims are allowed, the claims may not issue, or in the event of issuance, may not be sufficient to protect our products, product candidates or platform technologies or may be challenged in post-grant proceedings by third parties. 

The patent positions of pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other life sciences companies can be highly uncertain and involve complex legal and factual questions for which important legal principles remain unresolved. This uncertainty is heightened for our PMO-based products and product candidates and gene therapy-based products and product candidates for which there has not been a significant number of patent litigations involving such technologies. Congress periodically considers changes to patent law, and that such changes could have adverse effects. No consistent policy regarding the breadth of claims allowed in biotechnology patents has emerged to date in the U.S. and tests used for determining the patentability of patent claims in all technologies are in flux. The USPTO and patent offices in other jurisdictions have often required that patent applications directed to pharmaceutical and/or biotechnology-related inventions be limited or narrowed substantially to cover only the specific innovations exemplified in the patent application, thereby limiting the scope of protection against competitive challenges. Accordingly, even if we or our licensors are able to obtain patents, the patents might be substantially narrower than anticipated. Thus, there is no assurance as to the degree and range of protections any of our patents, if issued, may afford us or whether patents will be issued. Patents which may be issued to us may be subjected to further governmental review that may ultimately result in the reduction of their scope of protection, and pending patent applications may have their requested breadth of protection significantly limited before being issued, if issued at all. The pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other life sciences patent situation outside the U.S. can be even more uncertain.  

As a matter of public policy, there might be significant pressure on governmental bodies to limit the scope of patent protection or impose compulsory licenses for disease treatments that prove successful, particularly as a tactic to impose a price control. Additionally, competitors may leverage such pressure to enhance their ability to exploit these laws to create, develop and market competing products.

We may be able to assert that certain activities engaged in by our competitors infringe on our current or future patent rights. To the extent that we enforce our patents, an alleged infringer may deny infringement and/or counter-claim that our patents are not valid or enforceable, and if successful, could negatively impact our patent estate. We may not be able to successfully defend