China’s Supreme People’s Court Intellectual Property Court released its administrative judgment in case (2022) Zui Gao Fa Zhi Xing Zhong No. 255 on 13 July 2026, dismissing the appeal against the validity of a patent covering an in-vitro diagnostic device and system held by EDAN Diagnostics. The dispute centred on whether the invention had been completed in China and therefore required a confidentiality examination before its first foreign filing. The court treated the place where the substantive technical solution was formed—not the applicant’s nationality, funding source or later commercialisation—as the decisive issue, relying on contemporaneous emails, technical discussions and travel records to support the finding that the relevant inventive work was completed in the United States.
The ruling gives cross-border R&D teams a practical evidentiary benchmark. A law-firm analysis published on 16 July highlighted the weight of contemporaneous technical records: design histories, laboratory notes, inventor locations, division of responsibilities and dated communications should form a coherent record before any overseas filing decision is made. Companies should therefore assess China’s foreign-filing security review requirement as a separate pre-filing compliance step. Reconstructing the development history only after a validity challenge is likely to be slower, more expensive and less persuasive.
