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Following its Strategic Plan for 2018-2021, the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BPTO) continues to expand international cooperation through Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) agreements. On July 1, 2019, the BPTO launched the third phase of the PPH agreement with other 8 patent offices from PROSUL: Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Costa Rica.

Through the PPH agreement, a patent application filed in Brazil (or, in the PCT scope, with Brazil as receiving office), and already considered patentable, can serve as a basis to expedite the examination of a corresponding patent application in any of the other 8 countries of PROSUL (and vice-versa). Like Phase II, each applicant may request the fast-track examination once per monthly cycle – excluding the last month of the project, when there will be no restriction regarding the amount of requests per applicant.

Unlike Phase II of the project, where the participation could be requested at any time during prosecution, the Phase III of PPH BPTO-PROSUL pilot project narrows the possibility of request just for applications whose substantive examinations have not been initiated yet.

Requests for participating into Phase III will be accepted until June 31, 2021, bearing in mind that the project will receive up to 200 requests, and will be in force until all accepted applications are decided. Final decisions on applications related to PPH programs have been issued in approximately 180 days.

The full press statement is available (in Portuguese) at the Official Gazette Nº 2530, by Resolution no. 242/2019.