Cantrixil Study, page-7

Well I have my answer back from management on these IPs just granted. Rather than explain I will just paste it straight up from their IP lawyer just the relevant section of the email.   In nutshell we have shared ancestry and shared treatment goals  but no space race between the two different applications, so I was wrong in presuming that.  


"In terms of the IP question, I will confess that this has never been my strong suit, so I did forward your question to our IP lawyer. He did comment that you appear to be more on top of this than many of his associates. I have reproduced his answer below verbatim:-

As both we and MEI have filed many applications directed to benzopyran-type compounds over the past 10 years, it is inevitable that our applications will be cited against their applications during examination and vice versa.
The MEI patents to which you refer are directed to pharmaceutical formulations comprising a single specific compound (known as ME-344 and previously known as NV-344).  Whilst the treatments claimed for their compound and our compounds are the same or similar, ME-344 is structurally distinct from the compounds we have been pursuing in applications US20180141925 and US2016340329. There is therefore no space race between us as each company is pursuing different compounds. In this regard, ME-344 belongs to the same generation of compounds as NV-196 and NV-128, which you may recall were sold to MEI many years ago. Compounds such as cantrixil and trilexium represent a new generation of benzopyrans with structural modifications that translate into improved activity."