In just under two years, in Europe alone, India has succeeded in bringing about the cancellation or withdrawal of 36 applications to patent traditionally known medicinal formulations. The key to this success has been its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a database containing 34 million pages of formatted information on some 2,260,000 medicinal formulations in multiple languages. Designed as a tool to assist patent examiners of major intellectual property (IP) offices in carrying out prior art' searches, the TKDL is a unique repository of India's traditional medical wisdom. It bridges the linguistic gap between traditional knowledge expressed in languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil, and those used by patent examiners of major IP offices. India's TKDL is proving a powerful weapon in the country's fight against erroneous patents, sometimes referred to as "biopiracy". In this article, Dr. V.K. Gupta, the author and architect of India's TKDL, explains the critical role that this unique tool plays in protecting India's traditional knowledge.
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