Intellectual Property Rights and Its Role in Natural Product Research

Intellectual property right (IPR), an exclusive privilege for intangible human creation, incorporates elusive manifestations of the human acumen and envelops copyrights, patent, and trademarks. It incorporates different sorts of rights, for example, exchange insider facts, publicity rights, moral rights, and rights against unjustifiable rivalry. Both in developed and developing countries, herbal-based drugs are now gaining importance in curing vivid physiological anomalies and in turn enriching their commercial values. These increasing demands of traditional plant-based medicines are due to their affordability and availability. Traditional medicine generally includes natural assets and the information of local and indigenous people groups as well as healers in regard to their therapeutic utility. Subsequently, it is interlinked with biodiversity preservation and indigenous people groups’ rights over their insight and assets. So, for this situation, there is a constant need for improving the safety of both pharmaceutical and conventional frameworks. Again, there is a probability of stealing of newly designed or some novel developed medication derived from natural products. To ensure safety of research, it is mandatory to protect the discovered outcome or product by any means involving law. Such protecting law includes patent or with trade secret. In this chapter, we will discuss the importance of intellectual property rights (IPR) and patent in the field of natural product research.