Maarten Meulenbelt

Practice Areas

Maarten is the head of Sidley’s Global Life Sciences practice in Europe. He focuses his practice on EU regulatory affairs, litigation, and competition law issues affecting the life sciences sector in Europe, covering the full range of the product life cycle.

He acts as a key advisor to companies and industry associations regarding new EU laws, in particular the Pharma Review and the Patent Package proposed in April 2023. As a litigator, Maarten has extensive experience before the EU Courts, national courts and competition authorities, the European Commission, European Medicines Agency committees, national medicines agencies, and pricing & reimbursement authorities in several EU Member States. Maarten has significant competition law experience in a variety of sectors, notably regarding pricing.

Maarten has acted before EU institutions and before the EU courts to defend regulatory data protection for combination products (T-547/12), to ensure the compatibility of national pricing laws, advertising laws and online sales restrictions with EU law (C-148/15, C-606/21, C-517/23), to ensure the highest science-based standard of review by the European Medicines Agency (T-211/18), to ensure market access for drug and device companies to the EU market (T-764/21), to ensure competition law is not applied without taking into account EU law as a whole (C-67/96, C-115/97, C-219/97), to ensure companies can transfer personal data to the US (T-738/16 and ongoing disputes between EU institutions), and various trade policy and State aid cases. Before EU and national courts, and regulatory and competition agencies, Maarten is acting to uphold the EU marketing authorization system (e.g. against replacement pharmacy compounding), and to ensure that decisions on market access and pricing of pharmaceuticals and medical devices reflect the value and risk of product development.