Brazil and Peru test collaborative patent examination as INPI resets its long-term strategy

Brazil’s National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) and Peru’s INDECOPI have moved patent cooperation into a more operational phase. On 11 August 2026, Brazil’s INPI announced the launch of a collaborative examination project covering an initial group of nine applications in pharmaceuticals, medicinal chemistry and biopharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and natural products. The selected cases must be linked through the PCT route, have corresponding family applications before both offices, and fall within defined national-phase filing windows. Once selected, they are advanced for technical examination, although each office continues to apply its own substantive law and examination practice.

Days later, Brazil’s INPI published its 2027–2036 strategic plan. Read together, the two developments point to more than a simple acceleration initiative: one is a live test of work-sharing on related patent families, while the other places productivity, examination quality, digital transformation, artificial intelligence and international cooperation within a ten-year institutional framework. One distinction matters. The decade-long strategy is directional; widely discussed figures such as a 3.5-year average patent decision cycle and roughly ten months for unopposed trademark decisions are better understood as near-term operational benchmarks associated with INPI’s current planning cycle, not as immutable promises fixed through 2036.

This is not an open-ended Latin American PPH track

The first phase has relatively tight boundaries. The two offices have not announced that every patent family with corresponding Brazilian and Peruvian filings can automatically enter collaborative examination. The current arrangement is a selected pilot. The first nine cases sit in pharmaceuticals, medicinal chemistry and biopharmaceuticals, biotechnology and natural products, and must satisfy PCT-family and national-phase timing requirements. For applicants, the immediate benefit is earlier technical examination, not mutual recognition of examination outcomes.

That distinction should shape expectations. A conventional PPH route normally relies on a positive work product from one office to support acceleration in another. Collaborative examination is closer to structured examiner-to-examiner cooperation around substantively related family cases, including comparison of searches, cited prior art and technical reasoning. It may reduce duplicated work and improve consistency, but the legal outcome can still diverge. Brazil applies its Industrial Property Law and INPI examination guidance; Peru operates under a different legal framework that includes Andean Community Decision 486. The same specification and the same priority claim do not guarantee the same allowable claim scope.

Life sciences are a demanding test case, not an easy showcase

If the only objective were to demonstrate faster administration, simpler mechanical inventions would have been the safer choice. Starting with pharmaceuticals, biopharmaceuticals, biotechnology and natural products suggests that the offices want to test whether collaboration creates value in technically and legally difficult cases. Life-science applications can raise novelty, inventive step, sufficiency, support, natural-product exclusions, sequence disclosure, microorganism issues and treatment-use questions at the same time. Those issues depend heavily on both search quality and local legal doctrine.

The most important metric, therefore, is not simply whether the nine files move faster. It is whether the offices can develop reusable work-sharing patterns. Can prior-art work from one examiner meaningfully reduce duplicated searching by the other? Can an analysis of support or enablement help the second office identify the real point of dispute earlier? Can direct technical exchange make first examination reports more focused? If the answer is yes, the project could evolve from a small acceleration exercise into a foundation for regional examination capacity-sharing. If it only moves nine applications to the front of the queue, its policy significance will be much narrower.

Brazil’s ten-year plan reframes the backlog problem as an institutional-capacity problem

INPI’s 2027–2036 strategy is not written as a ten-year spreadsheet of fixed KPIs. It sets a long-term institutional direction and leaves detailed numerical targets and projects to rolling multi-year business plans and annual action plans. That structure is important. For years, Brazil’s patent system was discussed primarily through the language of backlog. The new strategy asks a harder question: after backlog reduction, can INPI maintain sufficient examination capacity, quality, budget predictability and digital infrastructure over time?

Artificial intelligence sits in the tool layer of that transition, not in the legal-judgment layer. INPI’s existing planning already includes AI-assisted initiatives across patents, trademarks and industrial designs, while the longer strategy links digital tools and AI to productivity and quality. The practical first wave is more likely to involve search support, classification, case triage, document assistance and workflow automation than automated legal conclusions. Applicants should not assume AI will eliminate examiner differences. A more immediate consequence may be quicker examination cycles and more concentrated prior-art citations, which in turn pushes response preparation and claim strategy earlier in the prosecution timeline.

The 3.5-year and ten-month figures are better read as near-term operating benchmarks

Two numbers are attracting particular attention: an average patent decision cycle of around 3.5 years and roughly ten months for unopposed trademark decisions. Those figures are consistent with INPI’s current operational planning and management communications, but the ten-year strategy itself places detailed targets in subsequent business and annual action plans. It is therefore safer to treat the figures as current benchmarks against which INPI’s performance can be tested, rather than as fixed deadlines guaranteed for every year from 2027 to 2036.

That does not make them less important. If Brazil can sustain patent pendency near 3.5 years while expanding collaborative examination, PPH use, AI assistance and workflow automation, portfolio planning will change. Applicants may no longer need to treat Brazil primarily as a jurisdiction where rights are filed early and then left in a prolonged queue. For pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, earlier prosecution can affect the sequencing of clinical milestones, regulatory strategy, divisional filings, supplementary data, licensing discussions and claim narrowing.

Applicants should prepare for coordination before the pilot scales

Companies with related Brazilian and Peruvian life-science cases can already do useful work. The priority chain, PCT text, national-phase claim differences, sequence or biological-material disclosures, core prior art and prosecution history in each jurisdiction should be aligned and mapped. A common problem is that two national cases begin from the same PCT family but drift apart because of local amendments and different examination histories. The further they diverge, the less value a collaborative process can extract from shared technical work.

A cross-office prosecution matrix is also worth building. Record the first examination reports, citations, claim amendments and disputed issues from Brazil and Peru side by side. If collaborative examination expands, the real advantage will not be copying an answer from one office into the other. It will be identifying which technical arguments can travel across jurisdictions and which must be rebuilt under local law. For life-science companies, coordinated claim architecture is often more valuable than speed alone. A faster pair of grants with poorly aligned scope may be less useful commercially than a slightly slower portfolio that supports the same licensing and market strategy in both countries.