Singapore Intellectual Property Blog

I am very much looking forward to attending the CIPA Life Sciences Conference 2025 at The Belfry Hotel & Resort, the UK’s key annual gathering for life sciences patent and IP professionals.

This FAQ summarises the main points from our detailed blog article on what constitutes a patentable invention in Singapore and how exclusions are applied in practice.

For an overview of how patents work in general, see our Guide to Patent Filing in Singapore and Patents Services page.

I am very pleased to be attending the FICPI World Congress 2025, which will take place from 12 to 17 October 2025 at the Royal Continental Hotel Napoli, overlooking the Bay of Naples. This will be my first time attending the Congress and I am looking forward to the experience.

I’m pleased to say that I’ll be attending the Asian Patent Attorneys Association (APAA) 2025 Conference in Kuala Lumpur this November.

TL;DR IPOS has now introduced a general acceleration programme for fast-tracking patent applications in Singapore

As some readers may be aware, we have recently been experiencing a significant backlog in examination of patent applications at the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS).

In the good old days, we would typically expect an office action (whether a Written Opinion or more rarely a Notice of Intention to Grant) to issue within 3-6 months of requesting examination on a Singapore patent application. Nowadays, it is not unusual for a year or two to pass before IPOS even acknowledges that examination has been requested.

We and others in the profession, including the Association of Singapore Patent Attorneys (ASPA, where I sit on the executive committee) have discussed this issue at length with IPOS. The Singapore Patent Office, to its credit, has recently started recruiting and training patent examiners. It is clear, however, that it will be a few years before these trainee examiners can be considered fully fit to undertake the challenging jobs of examining patent applications in Singapore.

Meanwhile, IPOS has been looking at other ways to solve this problem.

The good news is that applicants pursuing patent applications in Singapore now have an opportunity to “fast track” their cases before IPOS. Thus, the recently announced revised “FAST” programme at IPOS now allows search and examination of patent applications to be accelerated.

The not so good news is the significant additional official fees that are required to get an application into the programme.