MANUAL FOR PATENT DEPOSITS

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

WHY DEPOSIT (MICRO)BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL WITH
A BCCM™ COLLECTION

Patent law requires disclosure of the full details of an invention.
Descriptions and drawings proved to be inadequate and insufficient if the invention involved the use of microorganisms or plasmids for instance.
Therefore, it was internationally agreed that samples of them have to be deposited in a culture collection recognized as an "International Depository Authority (IDA)" within the framework of the Budapest Treaty on the international recognition of the deposit of microorganisms for the purposes of patent procedure.

BCCM^TM (Belgian Co-ordinated Collections of Microorganisms), a consortium of 4 complementary research-based service culture collections have been recognized as an IDA by the "World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)" since 1992.

As a result of this recognition, a single valid deposit with one of the BCCM™ -collections automatically satisfies all the requirements of the "European Patent Organization (EPO)" and the Patent Offices of all other States that are party to the Treaty.
Together they represent nearly all West European and a large number of East European countries including the CIS, as well as Australia, Japan, the United States, etc...

DEFINITIONS

Microorganism: The Budapest Treaty does not define the term.
In practice however it is used in a broad sense. Genetic material (e.g. plasmids, oncogenes, RNA), human and animal cell lines, hybridomas, although not being microorganisms, fall under the rules of the Treaty since their deposit is necessary for the purpose of disclosure of the invention.
This manual uses "microorganism" and "(micro)biological material" interchangeably.