Company: GIFLF
Filing Date: 2025-04-11
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001104659-25-034245
Chunk: 44

Company: Grifols SA
Filing Date: 2025-04-11
Form: 20-F
Item: Item 3
Chunk 44
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 consent orders and other adverse actions, any of which could have a material adverse impact on our business, financial condition and results of operations. For information regarding our cybersecurity risk management and governance, see Item 16K of Part II of this annual report, “Cybersecurity.”
Our success depends in large part on our ability to obtain and maintain protection in the United States and other countries of the intellectual property relating to or incorporated into our technology and products.
Our success depends in large part on our ability to obtain and maintain protection in the United States and other countries for the intellectual property covering or incorporated into our technology and products, especially intellectual property related to our purification processes. The patent landscape in the field of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals generally is highly uncertain and involves complex legal and scientific questions. We may not be able to obtain additional issued patents relating to our technology or products. Even if patents are issued to us or to our licensors, they may be challenged, narrowed, invalidated, held to be unenforceable or circumvented, which could limit our ability to stop competitors from marketing similar products or limit the length of time our products have patent protection. Additionally, most of our patents relate to the processes we use to produce our products, not to the products themselves. In many cases, the plasma-derived products we produce or develop in the future will not, in and of themselves, be patentable. Since our patents relate to processes, if a competitor is able to design and utilize a process that does not rely on our protected intellectual property, such competitor could sell a plasma-derived or other product similar to one we developed or sell.
Our patents also may not afford us protection against competitors with similar technology. Because patent applications in the United States and many other jurisdictions are typically not published until 18 months after their filing, if at all, and because publications of discoveries in the scientific literature often lag behind actual discoveries, neither we nor our licensors can be certain that we or they were the first to make the inventions claimed in our or their issued patents or pending patent applications, or that we or they were the first to file for protection of the inventions set forth in such patent applications. If a third party has also filed a U.S. patent application covering our product candidates or a similar invention, we may be required to participate in an adversarial proceeding, known as an “interference proceeding,” declared by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to determine priority of invention in the United States. The costs of these proceedings could be substantial and our efforts in them could