Simone Giacobbe

An Italian patent attorney with significant experience at the European Patent Office, Simone Giacobbe specialises in the applied chemistry field with a focus on drug discovery, medicinal chemistry, galenics and cosmetics.

Having worked for many years both at a major pharmaceutical company and the European Patent Office (EPO), Simone has a wealth of first-hand experience in pharmaceutical research and patent examination. He is highly experienced across all areas of patent prosecution (from filing to opposition) and is fluent in English, German and French (as well as his native Italian).

Simone’s time as an examiner provides him with unique insight into the EPO’s inner workings, procedures and the way that applications are approached by examiners at the search and examination phases. He also has vast experience in opposition-intensive technical fields with multiple parties. Simone spent 12 years at the EPO in the field of second medical use (pharmacy), before moving to galenics and (later) cosmetics. In between, he was seconded for three years to the quality department and took part in the EPO’s ISO9000 certification for its search and examination procedures. For his last six years at the EPO, Simone managed a team of around 12 examiners.

During his studies, Simone spent three years at the University of Chicago, where he attempted the synthesis of polyolefin backbones bearing the cubane molecule as pendant substituents. Here, he experienced all the frustrations of basic research. Simone then moved to the Glaxo Research Center in Verona, where for six years he worked in the fields of neuroscience (NMDA receptor antagonists) and antibiotics.

On different occasions, Simone has been an instructor for the EPO Academy (for Vietnam, Morocco and WIPO) and is a longstanding tutor at CEIPI, where he has prepared generations of attorneys for papers A and B of the European Qualifying Examination (EQE). He is also flying tutor in the basic course.

Simone joined Murgitroyd in November 2022. While he has passed the EQEs, he will become a fully-fledged European patent attorney after two years of practice.