Brazil finalises accession to the Budapest Treaty

By Pedro Henrique Borges de Figueiredo, Partner at Dannemann Siemsen

Legislative decree bill (PDL 466/2022) joining the Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure (‘Budapest Treaty’) was approved by the Senate on Wednesday, 11 June 2025, and is awaiting promulgation.

Brazil's accession to the Budapest Treaty resolves a long-standing demand from national institutions that conduct research in the field of biotechnology and wish to obtain patent protection for their inventions.

In order to comply with the requirement of sufficient disclosure requirement of the patent system, the Industrial Property Law (LPI) requires in the sole paragraph of its Article 24 that patent applications related to inventions whose reduction to practice requires biological material – such as cells of microorganism or animals and plant seeds, that cannot be reproduced in any other way and that is not accessible to the public – are supplemented by the deposit of this material with an institution authorized by INPI or indicated in an international agreement.

The Budapest Treaty, signed in 1977 under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), allows the deposit of biological material with a single International Depositary Authority (IDA) recognised by WIPO to be considered valid for the purposes of supplementing patent applications in all contracting states.

Although the Brazilian PTO (INPI) has recognized deposits made in collections authorized by this treaty since 1997 through INPI/PR Normative Act No. 127, Brazil's lack of formal accession to the treaty meant that national institutions could not apply for IDAs recognized by WIPO.

In practice, deposits in Budapest Treaty IDAs were valid for patent applications, but national institutions developing inventions involving new microorganisms, plants, and animal cells were required to perform deposits in foreign IDAs. This obligation entailed high costs, logistical difficulties, regulatory requirements and sanitary barriers for the export of biological material, in addition to compromising sensitive legal deadlines for the filing of patent applications.

Brazil's formal accession to the Budapest Treaty corrects this distortion, allowing the accreditation of depository institutions in the national territory. Once a Brazilian institution is recognized as an IDA, the deposit of biological material for the purpose of supplementing patent applications by national companies and research institutions will be significantly simplified and reduced in cost.

This is a strategic step, aligning the country with international standards, and fundamental for the development of national biotechnology sector, especially in the agricultural bioinputs sector, a field wherein Brazil is known for cutting-edge research – whose inventions often depend on the deposit of biological material – and which reached, in the 2023/2024 harvest, R$5 billion in revenue, showing an average annual expansion of 21%, four times higher than the global average.

The deposit of biological material for patent purposes in Brazil and its validity in other signatory jurisdictions made possible by the country's accession to the Budapest Treaty reinforces the country's competitiveness in the field of Biotechnology.