House passes sweeping revision of U.S. patent laws

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The White House said it would oppose the bill unless it was revised to change limits on the discretion of a court to determine damages adequate for an infringement. The administration said it supported other aspects of the bill, including steps to bring the U.S. system in line with patent systems in Europe and Japan.

The United States, which carried out its last major patent overhaul in 1952, is the only major industrialized country with a first-to-invent system that awards patents to the first inventor.

The measure would change the rules at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office so patents would go to the first person to file an application, not necessarily the first inventor. That would limit multiyear debates over who was the first to invent new technology. It also would allow third parties to introduce evidence against applications, and create a system, called post-grant opposition, for challenging newly issued patents.

It would also limit where patent suits could be filed to keep lawyers from shopping for court districts deemed friendly to patent owners. The legislation also would create a new way to calculate damages and allow immediate appeals of court rulings on the interpretation of patent terms while the case is proceeding.

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Nigeria has filed charges against the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, accusing it of carrying out improper trials for an anti-meningitis drug in 1996.

Families were urged to take their sick children to Kano's infectious diseases hospital to receive treatment.

This is where Pfizer was testing a new antibiotic, Trovan, which was given to some of the sick children.

About 200 children died and more developed deformities.

The Nigerian government says these were caused by Trovan and says Pfizer did not get authorisation before giving out the drug. It wants $7bn in compensation.

Pfizer denied this, says the trials were carried out according to local and international law and that Trovan helped save lives during the meningitis outbreak.

Trovan has since been licensed for use by adults in the US but not Nigeria.

Pfizer Faces Criminal Charges in Nigeria

The move represents a rare -- perhaps unprecedented -- instance in which the developing world's anger at multinational drug companies has boiled over into criminal charges. It also represents the latest in a string of public-relations blows stemming from the decade-old clinical trial, in which Pfizer says it acted ethically.

The government alleges that Pfizer researchers selected 200 children and infants from crowds at a makeshift epidemic camp in Kano and gave about half of the group an untested antibiotic called Trovan. Researchers gave the other children what the lawsuit describes as a dangerously low dose of a comparison drug made by Hoffmann-La Roche. Nigerian officials say Pfizer's actions resulted in the deaths of an unspecified number of children and left others deaf, paralyzed, blind or brain-damaged.

The lawsuit says that the researchers did not obtain consent from the children's families and that the researchers knew Trovan to be an experimental drug with life-threatening side effects that was "unfit for human use." Parents were banned from the ward where the drug trial occurred, the suit says, and the company left no medical records in Nigeria.

Pfizer and its doctors "agreed to do an illegal act," the criminal charges state, and behaved "in a manner so rash and negligent as to endanger human life."