For many years, the ASEAN Patent Examination Co-operation, or ASPEC, has been presented as ASEAN’s answer to a familiar prosecution question: why should several national patent offices repeat the same search and examination work for corresponding applications?

ASPEC+ was launched at the regional level on 6 April 2026 as the next development of this framework. It is intended to provide more harmonised reports and more predictable timelines for applicants seeking patent protection across participating ASEAN jurisdictions. Regular ASPEC generally allows an applicant to rely on an existing search or examination result from one participating ASEAN Member State (AMS) IP Office to support examination in another. ASPEC+, by contrast, attempts to move from reliance on an existing result toward more coordinated examination among selected participating AMS IP Offices. In that sense, ASPEC+ is a more ambitious form of regional work-sharing, at least in design.

The workflow is also more structured than that of regular ASPEC. To utilize the system, applicants must navigate the following requirements:

• Concurrent filing: The applicant must file the ASPEC+ request simultaneously across the selected participating AMS IP Offices, either with a new search and examination request or substantive examination request, or while such request is pending before any office action or examination report has been issued.
• Corresponding applications: The selected applications must be corresponding applications, meaning that they claim priority to each other, share a priority claim, or are national phase entries of the same Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) application. Their claim sets must also be identical or sufficiently correspond to each other.
• Office A and Office B dynamics: The request indicates a preferred Office A and one or more Office B(s). Office A conducts search and examination and shares its report with the Office B(s). The Office B(s) then conduct their own examination and share their reports with Office A and the other Office B(s), after which the Offices consider whether identical or similar results can be issued.

Where alignment is not possible, each office proceeds according to its own law and practice. The target timeline is 10 to 14 months from the date of completion of formalities.

This target timeline is attractive, but it also makes timing critical, and Thailand illustrates the point rather neatly. Under the current Thai Patent Act, a substantive examination request may be filed only after publication and within five years from the publication date. The current statute, however, does not set a fixed publication date. In other ASEAN jurisdictions, examination-request deadlines may run on different and sometimes more fixed timetables. A practical mismatch may therefore arise: one ASEAN office may already be ready to proceed with examination, while Thailand may not yet have opened the examination door. The pending amendments to the Thai Patent Act may reduce this mismatch. Until then, applicants cannot simply assume that Thailand’s examination door will open on cue merely because the regional timetable would find that convenient.

Against that background, ASPEC+ in Thailand should be approached with realistic expectations. At the time of writing, we are not aware of any separate Thai notification or detailed local guidance specifically addressing ASPEC+. Its practical operation in Thailand therefore remains to be clarified.

It is also important to remember what ASPEC+ is not. It is not a regional patent grant system. It does not create a single ASEAN patent, nor does it bind a national IP Office to accept another office’s examination result. This is not a weakness in the framework; it is simply the nature of national patent examination. ASPEC+ may assist the national examination, but it does not replace the national process. Applicants should therefore be careful not to equate “work-sharing” with “work-replacing”. The former is the policy objective. The latter remains, understandably, unavailable.

Thailand’s practice under regular ASPEC offers a useful cautionary lesson. Under regular ASPEC, applicants may submit search and examination results from participating AMS IP Offices to support examination of corresponding Thai applications. A favourable ASEAN result, however, does not automatically lead to allowance in Thailand. Thai examiners may still conduct their own search, raise new objections, request additional foreign examination results, or place greater weight on results from major patent offices, such as the IP5 Offices. An applicant may therefore find that an ASPEC request has been filed, the supporting documents have been properly submitted, and the application nevertheless continues to depend on further materials from outside ASEAN. The route is certainly more cooperative in form, although in some cases the practical journey may remain reassuringly familiar.

For Thailand, the key question is not whether ASPEC+ sounds more coordinated than ASPEC. It clearly does. The real question is whether Thai examiners will give meaningful weight to ASEAN reports, whether coordinated examination will reduce divergent objections, and whether the process will change prosecution in practice rather than simply adding another structured layer to an already structured process.

These are not objections to ASPEC+. Rather, they are the natural questions that arise when a promising regional framework encounters the practical realities of national prosecution. It may be worth considering whether ASPEC+ should be supported by clear internal guidelines within the Thai Patent Office. Clear internal guidelines would empower Thai examiners to confidently rely on ASEAN reports without fear of compromising their mandate, thereby directly addressing the current examination backlog. This may help ASPEC+ operate as a consistent institutional practice, rather than leaving its practical value to vary with individual approaches. If applied effectively, this could streamline the national examination process and provide greater certainty for applicants.

In conclusion, ASPEC+ should not be dismissed, but it should not be oversold. It may become a meaningful improvement if shared examination results are actually used in daily practice. Otherwise, the practical meaning of the “plus” will depend less on the name of the programme and more on the extent to which examiners rely on the shared work product. For key patents, applicants should selectively test the ASPEC+ route to accelerate prosecution, while maintaining a robust strategy for standard national examination should local objections arise. Regional work-sharing is valuable. National examination, however, remains very much alive and well.