On 9 July 2026, India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and IP Australia signed an access agreement for the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) as part of the outcomes announced at the third India–Australia Annual Summit. Under the TKDL access framework, Australian patent examiners may use the database on a confidential basis for search and examination, drawing on a large body of documented traditional medicine formulations and related literature. IP Australia had already referred to TKDL as a non-patent literature resource in its examination guidance; the new agreement gives that access a clearer institutional footing.
The practical effect is likely to be felt most strongly in applications covering herbal extracts, biological formulations, combination therapies and derivative pharmaceutical uses. Examiners should be better placed to identify prior art that was previously dispersed across traditional medicine sources, making novelty, inventive step and claimed technical effects harder to establish. The legal patentability tests have not changed, but the evidence available to apply them has. Applicants should strengthen pre-filing traditional knowledge searches and provide more precise support for extraction methods, formulation ratios, unexpected effects and reproducible data; minor variations on known traditional formulations will face a more demanding examination record.
