The Delhi High Court has dismissed ITC's challenge to an Indian patent held by Philip Morris Products S.A. for a "heated aerosol generating article", the heat-not-burn device technology used in products such as IQOS, rejecting ITC's argument that the invention was obvious in light of prior-art smoking and vaping devices.
Philip Morris's patent, granted in December 2021 and running to 2034, covers the specific heating mechanism used in heat-not-burn tobacco devices, which warm tobacco rather than burning it. ITC filed a post-grant opposition to the patent, which the Patent Office rejected. ITC then pursued both a statutory appeal and a writ petition before the Delhi High Court against that rejection, arguing that the claimed invention lacked novelty and amounted to an obvious combination of ten cited prior-art smoking and vaping devices, several of which disclosed conductive metal wrappers used for heating purposes.
Justice Jyoti Singh dismissed both the appeal and the writ petition, holding that the cited prior art's disclosure of conductive metal wrappers did not, on its own, establish the specific heating function claimed in Philip Morris's patent, and that combining the ten references as ITC proposed would not have been obvious to a person skilled in the art at the relevant date. The rejection of ITC's post-grant opposition was accordingly affirmed, leaving the patent intact.