Law360 Canada ( July 17, 2026, 12:15 PM EDT) -- Appeal by Pharmascience Inc. (Pharmascience) from a judgment of the Federal Court of Appeal which upheld a judgment of the Federal Court. Janssen Inc. and Janssen Pharmaceutica N.V. (together, “Janssen”) filed a patent application in Canada for dosing regimens of an injectable formulation of paliperidone palmitate used to treat schizophrenia and related disorders. This became Patent 2,655,335 (the “335 Patent”). Janssen sought a declaration that Pharmascience would infringe the 335 Patent if it were to make, use or sell its generic version of Janssen’s patented medicine. Pharmascience argued that the 335 Patent was invalid on the basis that its claims were obvious or lacked inventiveness and, second, involved unpatentable subject matter. Before the Federal Court of Appeal, Pharmascience challenged the validity of the 335 Patent solely on the second ground. Both the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal affirmed that methods of medical treatment were unpatentable and upheld Janssen’s patent because it did not claim such a method. Pharmascience was now asking the Court to invalidate Janssen’s patent by broadening the test for an unpatentable method of medical treatment. For its part, Janssen was inviting the Court to uphold its patent by ruling that all methods of medical treatment were patentable as the exclusion rested entirely on former s. 41(1) of the Patent Act. Since s. 41(1) had been repealed, no legal basis remained for excluding methods of medical treatment from patentability. At issue was whether s. 2 of the Patent Act allowed a physician’s professional skill and judgment to be patented....