A cheat sheet to navigate the complex maze of pharmaceutical exclusivities in Europe.

As the two leading markets for pharmaceutical and biotech companies, the USA and Europe offer incentives to stimulate drug innovation, including patent and regulatory exclusivities. These exclusivities extend periods during which companies can market their products free of generic or other competition and recoup their investment. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies should carefully assess the different types of exclusivities available when developing regulatory submissions, patent filing strategies. The authors have previously summarized the USA exclusivities in an earlier publication. This article focuses on European exclusivities. Due to space limitations, it focuses on small molecule drugs. Analogously to the format previously used, we have provided a cheat sheet of European exclusivities for small molecule drugs in Figure 1 .