In a report for the World Intellectual Property Organisation, Dr VK Gupta, the author and architect of India's
TKDL, said that 'the fact that so many patents had been wrongfully granted in the US and Europe caused a great deal of national distress.
Researchers, Choudhury and Khanna, aimed to find out whether anything about patent applications changed after the creation of the
TKDL. (54) The
TKDL was designed to assist patent examiners of major intellectual property offices in carrying out prior art searches.
Evidence from the
TKDL proved the banana preparation was previously well-known, and the application was withdrawn.
Encouraged by the ongoing support of the government for internationalizing India's pioneering
TKDL as a template for the benefit of developing countries seeking to protect their traditional knowledge, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, has collaborated with Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
" The flower has long been known in the country for its use in the treatment of heart diseases,"
TKDL director V K Gupta, who sent the letter to the EPO, said.
Experts at
TKDL estimate that about 2,000 patents are wrongly granted every year that have been misappropriated from literature on Indian systems of medicine.
All
TKDL products will operate in combination with Wintrac 4.5 software and R:COM, to download recorded data up to five times faster than with the current TK branded TranScan devices.
Patent and Trademark Office signed a traditional knowledge digital library (
TKDL) access agreement.