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Professor Duncan Matthews, BSc (Hons), MA (Warwick), LLM (Exeter), PhD (London)

Duncan

Professor of Intellectual Property Law

Email: d.n.matthews@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 8074
Room Number: Lincoln's Inn Fields
Website: www.ccls.qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Duncan Matthews is the immediate past Director of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute (2019-2021) and a member of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies. He has acted as an advisor to the European Patent Office (EPO), the European Commission, the European Parliament, the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). He is asked regularly to provide consultancy advice on patent matters both in the UK and abroad.

He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, (Canberra, ACT) and the University of Verona (Italy) and teaches as an international expert on the WIPO LLM Programme at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland) and on the WIPO Summer Schools at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) and Huazhong University of Science & Technology (Wuhan, People’s Republic of China). He has also taught at the Humbolt University of Berlin and the University of Freiburg (both Germany) and the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law (People’s Republic of China). He has delivered public lectures at São Paulo University (Brazil), the University of the West Indies (Mona Campus, Jamaica), at the University of London in Paris (ULIP, France).

He is the author of over 60 publications on intellectual property law and is co-editor of the Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and the Life Sciences. He teaches European, U.S and international patent law to postgraduate law students and he is an expert on the patent provisions of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). His research interests include: intellectual property responses to Covid-19, the relationship between competition law and patent law, the role of patents in the governance of genome editing technologies, IP responses to Covid-19, intellectual property law in China, and the law and practice of the Unified Patent Court of the European Union.

Most recently he has been leading an international team of researchers investigating the role of patents and licences for the governance of human genome editing with Professor Abbe Brown (University of Aberdeen), Dr. Emanuela Gambini (Queen Mary University of London), Professor Timo Minssen (University of Copenhagen), Dr. Ana Nordberg (Lund University), Professor Jacob S. Sherkow (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Dr. Jakob Wested (University of Copenhagen), Professor Esther van Zimmeren (University of Antwerp) and Dr. Aisling McMahon (National University of Ireland, Maynooth). The research team provided expertise to the WHO International Advisory Committee on the Governance of Human Genome Editing and was acknowledged in the WHO Expert Advisory Committees’ final reports in July 2021.

He is interviewed regularly by international media outlets including the Financial Times, The Wire, Fortune, Pharma Technology Focus and Aljazeera.

He is currently co-editing (with Professor Paul Torremans, University of Nottingham) a Handbook on European Patent Law, which will be published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH in late 2023.

Postgraduate Teaching

Research

Duncan Matthews has been the Principal Investigator for the following UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) projects: (1) NGOs, Intellectual Property Rights and Multilateral Institutions (2) Determinants of Intellectual Property Management in UK Companies, (3) Company Responses to European Environmental Law.

His current research interests include: intellectual property responses to the Covid-19 pandemic; the relationship between competition law, intellectual property and access to medicines; the regulation of CRISPR gene editing technologies, intellectual property law in China, and the law and practice of the Unified Patent Court.

Publications

Other Selected Publications

Supervision

Doctoral Research Student Supervision

Duncan Matthews has supervised the following doctoral research students:

  • Alex Magaisa - Knowledge Protection in Indigenous Communities - The case of indigenous medical knowledge systems in Zimbabwe (completed 2005).
  • Mukhamad-Ali Kurmanbayev - An Analysis of the Development of Copyright Law and Practices in Kazakhstan (completed 2006).
  • Muriel Lightbourne - The FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture: Towards Food Security, Conservation, Equity? (completed 2007, Herchel Smith scholarship).
  • Fazeel Najeeb – IP-Related Technical Assistance: Lessons for developing countries (completed March 2011; Commonwealth scholarship).
  • Jerry Hsiao – Patent Protection for Chinese Traditional Medicines in Taiwan (completed November 2009).
  • Claudio Chiarolla – Development Perspectives on the FAO International Treaty’s Multilateral System (completed December 2009; Herchel Smith scholarship).
  • Rong He – An Empirical Study on the Interaction between Patent, Innovation and Public Health: case of China (completed September 2012; Wellcome Trust scholarship).
  • Burcu Kilic – Boosting Pharmaceutical Innovation in the Post-TRIPS era: The Real LIfe Lessons for the Developing World (completed January 2011; Queen Mary School of Law scholarship).
  • Tenu Avafia – Public Health Related TRIPS Flexibilities and South-South Co-operation as Enablers of Treatment Access in Eastern and Southern Africa: Perspectives from Producing and Importing Countries (completed March 2015).
  • Celucolo Peter Dludlu - Comparative study of substantive patentability standards in the UK and South Africa (completed March 2014; Herchel Smith scholarship).
  • Vivian Mak – Analysis of DNA Patenting and its Impact on Developing Nations (completed November 2014; Queen Mary School of Law scholarship).
  • Marta Diaz Pozo - The Role of the Requirement of Industrial Application in Gene Patenting: Practical Implications and Potential Impact on the Progress of Innovation (completed May 2015; Herchel Smith scholarship).
  • Mauricio Guaragna - Stimulating Innovation in Brazil: A Study of Intellectual Property Law, Biotechnology and Open Scientific Innovation (completed December 2016).
  • Emanuela Gambini: Imagined Nature. Intellectual Property of Biotech Inventions (completed August 2018, Herchel Smith scholarship).
  • Olga Gurgula - Strategic Patenting in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Analysing the Boundaries of Legality from a Competition Law Perspective (completed December 2018; Herchel Smith scholarship).
  • Michaela Halpern - Arbitrating Standard Essential Patent Licensing Disputes (completed July 2021; Herchel Smith scholarship).
  • Maciej Padamczyk - Determining the adequate degree of legal protection for emerging biotechnologies: Developing new eligibility criteria and morality-based exclusions for patent protection of emerging biotechnologies (commenced September 2021, Herchel Smith scholarship).

Public Engagement

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