Patent Office Research Articles

HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors: an updated review of biosynthesis and patent prospecting

HMG-CoA reductase (3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase) is the enzyme that plays a limiting role in cholesterol biosynthesis. Among the HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor molecules, statins stand out, a class of drug used in the treatment of atherosclerosis and in the reduction of high cholesterol levels, therefore they are biomolecules of medical and pharmaceutical importance. In this context, this work aimed to carry out a systematic mapping of patents and scientific articles related to the biosynthesis of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors. The search was carried out in the databases of the National Institute of Intellectual Property (INPI), the European Patent Office (Espacenet), the Derwent Innovations Index, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and also articles indexed in Scielo and Pubmed using as descriptors “statins”, “production and statins and fungi”, “statins and fungus”. Of the 2561 cataloged patents, 09 were included because they met the inclusion criteria. The number of scientific articles found in the databases was higher (2820) when compared to the number of patents. As a country, China represents the largest holder on the subject, corresponding to 88.9% of patented products. Based on the mapping, advances in the search for strategies for the biotechnological production of statins can be highlighted. Some of the inventions used microorganisms such as filamentous fungi associated with agro-industrial substrates as an alternative and low-cost source for the production of statins to replace synthetic sources. However, future studies can be carried out using new fungi and new renewable substrates, considering the existing biodiversity worldwide.

US patent protects Evonik's membrane-based process for efficient biogas upgrading

Germany's Evonik Industries Ag reports that in a voluntary supplementary examination procedure the US Patent Office has confirmed the validity of its patent covering a three-stage process for efficient biogas upgrading, which employs its SEPURAN® green membranes.

Identifying entrepreneurial discovery processes with weak and strong technology signals: a text mining approach.

This study aims to propose methods for identifying entrepreneurial discovery processes with weak/strong signals of technological changes and incorporating technology foresight in the design and planning of the Smart Specialization Strategy (S3). For this purpose, we first analyse patent abstracts from 2000 to 2009, obtained from the European Patent Office and use a keyword-based text mining approach to collect weak and strong technology signals; the word2vec algorithm is also employed to group weak signal keywords. We then utilize Correlation Explanation (CorEx) topic modelling to link technology weak/strong signals to invention activities for the period 2010-2018 and use the ANOVA statistical method to examine the relationship between technology weak/strong signals and patent values. The results suggest that patents related to weak rather than strong signals are more likely to be high-impact innovations and to serve as a basis for future technological developments. Furthermore, we use latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modelling to analyse patent activities related to weak/strong technology signals and compute regional topic weights. Finally, we present implications of the research.

Exploring new digital therapeutics technologies for psychiatric disorders using BERTopic and PatentSBERTa

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has accelerated the growth of the digital therapeutics (DTx) market; therefore, development strategies for new DTx products are necessary to satisfy market needs. However, data-driven methods for recommending digital healthcare technologies for novel DTx applications are scarce. We propose a technology opportunity discovery framework that recommends 1) potential technologies as new DTx products, and 2) the applicable target disorders. We applied BERTopic and PatentSBERTa to patents filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and calculated the score of potential technologies on the basis of their thematic characteristics with respect to their digital capabilities and similarity to DTx technologies. By identifying the target disorder of similar technologies, specific disorders were proposed that can be treated with the proposed technique. By applying the proposed framework to psychiatric disorders—one of the largest therapeutic areas of DTx, we recommend digital monitoring technologies applicable to poor breathing or sleeping patterns for cognitive impairment. Furthermore, we provide strategies to utilize the recommended digital technologies for DTx for specific disorders to facilitate a direct intervention or treatment, which can contribute to the planning of roadmaps for DTx.

A detailed overview of the patent system

The roots of today’s solid patent system are from the ancient trade system, the introduction, and the evolvement of different intellectual properties. Various international legislations, collaborations, and treaties, as well as the introduction of various acts, rules, and amendments, are responsible for the management and growth of the recent patent system. Novelty, utility, and non-obviousness are the basic patentability criteria. The Indian patent act also defines things that are not inventions under section 3 of the Indian patent act as “statutory subject matter”. The patent system working is described under patent prosecution (filing, publication, examination, opposition) sequentially. “Patent co-operation treaty” (PCT) introduced by the “World intellectual property organization” provides a most effective and economical way of patent application in multiple countries through a single filed application. A general overview of a patent application, drafting of claims, patent analysis, invalidation of patents, Infringement of patents, non-infringing activities, prosecution history estoppel, and remedies under the jurisdiction, are also described hereunder. At present, the number of patent applications filed in India is continuously increasing. Indian patent office is becoming one of the designated search authorities under the PCT. General awareness about patents and intellectual property in all sectors can be improved further.

Technological forecasting for fuel cell electric vehicle: A comparison with electric vehicles and internal combustion engine vehicles

Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs), Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) and Fuel Cell Vehicles (FCEVs) are potential alternatives to replacing the Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles (ICEVs). However, these new possibilities, that aim to make mobility more sustainable, still lack greater research and development to boost their competitiveness and achieve technological maturity. The goal of this study is to analyze the technological life cycle of the FCEVs and compare it with other propulsion modes (ICEVs, HEVs and BEVs). Data was collected on the Questel Orbit platform for patent families published in the US (United States Patent and Trademark Office) and EP (European Patent Office). Using logistc model and LogletLab 4 software, it was possible to evaluate the level of technological maturity of each one of these technologies. The results of the search through patents show that FCEVs technology has reached technological maturity, and it is very close to saturation (between 2018 and 2024). The annual growth rate of the patent families for FCEVs decreased after 2009, reaching between 1 and 7%. In comparison, ICEVs are a mature technology, with its expected saturation between the years 2037–2043. HEVs and BEVs are the “hot” area of the technological movement and are causing greater R&D efforts.

Technological prospection of sewage treatment device directed to single-family use

The sewage collection and treatment system are one of the biggest problems of contemporary civilization, likewise, Brazil has a deficit in the proportion of production/collection and treatment, moreover, this senile contributes to the pollution of the environment and the proliferation of diseases, since waste is released in nature in the streets and river beds in regions where there is no sewage network. Based on this problem, this work aims to prospectively survey patents related to devices that present sewage treatment technology. For this purpose, the European Patent Office (ESPACENET) database was used. The prospecting was based on keywords and international classification of patents and resulted in 10796 records, of which 75% refer to IPC C02F9, which encompasses technologies covering the multi-stage treatment of water, waste water or sewage.

Multi-modal chemical information reconstruction from images and texts for exploring the near-drug space.

Identification of new chemical compounds with desired structural diversity and biological properties plays an essential role in drug discovery, yet the construction of such a potential space with elements of 'near-drug' properties is still a challenging task. In this work, we proposed a multimodal chemical information reconstruction system to automatically process, extract and align heterogeneous information from the text descriptions and structural images of chemical patents. Our key innovation lies in a heterogeneous data generator that produces cross-modality training data in the form of text descriptions and Markush structure images, from which a two-branch model with image- and text-processing units can then learn to both recognize heterogeneous chemical entities and simultaneously capture their correspondence. In particular, we have collected chemical structures from ChEMBL database and chemical patents from the European Patent Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office using keywords 'A61P, compound, structure' in the years from 2010 to 2020, and generated heterogeneous chemical information datasets with 210K structural images and 7818 annotated text snippets. Based on the reconstructed results and substituent replacement rules, structural libraries of a huge number of near-drug compounds can be generated automatically. In quantitative evaluations, our model can correctly reconstruct 97% of the molecular images into structured format and achieve an F1-score around 97-98% in the recognition of chemical entities, which demonstrated the effectiveness of our model in automatic information extraction from chemical patents, and hopefully transforming them to a user-friendly, structured molecular database enriching the near-drug space to realize the intelligent retrieval technology of chemical knowledge.

Re evaluating Indias Third Mission through Top Ranked Universities & Technological Institutes

The present study explores the patenting activities of the faculty staff of the top 20 Indian academic and engineering institutes during 2011-2020 by excavating the Indian patent office database. Of the total 963 granted patents, the highest patents were published in 2016, and the academician of IIT Madras invented 167 patents followed by IIT Mumbai with 156 patents during this period. Most of the innovation takes place in the macro-field like chemical engineering, and micro-fields like nano-technology, nano-materials, and nano-complex. Collaboration with inventors of the same academic institution is found as the best choice of the inventors, only a meagre portion of patents was published in collaboration with of industries and organisations around the globe. The tag ‘highest number of patents inventor’ goes to Padma Shri Prof. Thalappil Pradeep of IIT Madras who has contributed 19 Indian patents in the last 10 years.

High Analytics Information Technologies: A Patent-Based Cooperation Network Analysis

Technologies that involve great part of firms are those based on high analytics information (HAI) technologies as an essential resource for operating different types of businesses. Through HAI patents analysis filed between 2000 and 2020 in the main patent offices in the world, this study aims to understand whether assignees have been developing HAI technologies in cooperation and emerging HAI technologies using social network analysis (SNA). Findings show that HAI patents assignees prioritize half of their developments in R&D internally, and the other half in partnership with other companies, primarily. It is also identified that cooperation relations are between organizations with the same nationality, especially those in South Korean and North American. In addition, United States is the main market of interest even the number of HAI technologies patented have been decreasing over the last five years. Despite this context, the identification of relational capabilities between assignees and the reconfiguration of resources, as a dynamic capability, is evidenced in HAI technologies development. Findings may support to identify HAI that still emerge in different industries, especially in service industry and support strategic Research & Development (R&D) decision-making processes to prioritize investments, identify new partnerships to innovate, or collaborate to develop public policies to foster new HAI technologies development.

“Agricultural Weeder with Nail Assembly” for Weed Control, Soil Moisture Conservation, Soil Aeration and Increasing Crop Productivity

“Agricultural weeder with nail assembly” (Design registration no. 289754 in class 15-03, dt. 13-09-2019, Patent Office Kolkata, GOI) has been developed to mechanically weed out young composite weed flora including germinating ones, since 5-7 days of crop sowing at field capacity (FC), from line sown and broadcast field (cereals, pulses, oilseeds, jute, mesta, flax, sunnhemp,) and horticultural crops (vegetables and flowers etc.). This tool contains i) a nail assembly with 5-6 nos. of nails (6-8 mm dia.) fixed with nuts at 3 cm apart in series ii) scrapper (of different types) and iii) tine, to suit different types of operations. Addition of a boat replacing its front wheels and two conical rotors in the main frame, make it suitable to control weeds in transplanted rice field also. With the help of this tool, 85 to 90 per cent of composite weeds can be controlled. In two successive operations, at 5 days intervals since 5 days after crop emergence, it requires only 12-18 man days/ha and saves Rs.15000 to Rs.20000/ha. It produced 33 to 40 quintal jute fibre/ ha, 4.5 to 5 tonnes of upland and transplanted land rice, 3.0 to 4.5 tonnes of wheat and 15 q mustard/ha under farmers’ field and at ICAR-CRIJAF in different years. It increases soil aeration (Oxygen diffusion rate, ODR: 303 μg O2 m-2 sec-1), keeps the soil cooler (1-50C) and improves soil moisture (4-15%) by soil mulching in drier months and improves jute fibre yield (10-20%) and its water productivity. Till now around 55000 numbers of “Agricultural Weeder with Nail assembly” have been distributed to the jute farmers of West Bengal by Department of Agril. Govt. of WB. Due to its low draft (8-15 kg only at FC), women, youngsters and aged persons can also operate the tool easily in different crop round the year.

Leveled odds? Attorney capability, team litigation, and outcomes in administrative patent cases

AbstractWe examine the impact of legal representation in an administrative setting. Focusing on adversarial proceedings within the United States Patent and Trademark Office and employing new data on patent litigation, we investigate patent rights—a legal area dominated by specialized, upper‐hemisphere litigation teams that generally represent parties with ample resources. Even in an environment with substantial parity in representational capability, we find that litigation team quality matters. Perceived firm quality and litigation team size both enhance the likelihood of victory; these findings are robust under a number of different approaches used to account for the ability of attorneys to select their clients.

Selected Aspects of Innovative Activity of Polish Enterprises in 2016–2020

Abstract The study aimed to analyse selected aspects of innovative activities of enterprises in Poland in 2016–2020. The article is based on literature studies, using a query of scientific publications and statistical analyses of data published by Statistics Poland and the Patent Office of the Republic of Poland (PORP) for 2016–2020. Findings show that in 2016–2020 the number of innovative industrial and service enterprises that primarily implemented innovations in business processes was increasing. The innovations included, in particular, processes of manufacturing products in industrial enterprises, as well as external and internal communication in service enterprises. Although the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic did not affect the activities of the majority of surveyed companies significantly, the changes in the functioning of those impacted by COVID-19 caused a more frequent implementation of innovations in business processes than in the product processes. Innovative activities conducted in enterprises were financed mainly from own funds, including internal outlays for innovative activities of enterprises and funds obtained from government and local government institutions, most often used by the entrepreneurs to purchase fixed assets. The smallest share of outlays was allocated to the protection of intellectual property in enterprises, which is undoubtedly one of the most often underestimated areas determining effective protection of innovations in enterprises.

The Role of Patents for Economic Growth at Macro and Micro Level

The purpose of the present study is to examine the extent to which patents have an impact on GDP and net profit. The object of the study are the changes in the GDP of two technologically highly developed countries – Japan and South Korea, and two technologically underdeveloped countries – Russia and Brazil, as well as the changes in the net profit of leading companies in these countries. The subject of the study is the comparison of the impact of patent activity through newly issued patents by the European Patent Office, and unemployment and foreign direct investment at the macroeconomic level and the share price, gross income and gross debt at the microeconomic level. Comparative analysis and least squares method have been used. It is expected that the role of patent activity will be stronger in the considered technologically highly developed countries and companies and correspondingly weaker in the considered technologically underdeveloped countries and companies.

Dental Patents in India: A Decade Long Review.

The advent of technology in dentistry compels the safeguard of intellectual property to guarantee a steady flow of ideas. A guarantee preserves the idea/invention which is conductive to the subsequent financial gain or marketing of the said product for the patentee. The main objective of the present study was to illuminate the trends in the dental patents filed in India over the past decade and to analyze these in context with the recent developments in dental markets. A total of 641 dental patent applications retrieved from the Indian Government Official Website between 2010 and 2020 were scanned for field of invention, type or status of application along with details regarding date of publication or filing of application, etc., The dataset was collaboratively analyzed using Panda's Library in Python software as analysis tool for data preparation and frequency analysis. The estimates were presented as mean differences and 95% confidence intervals. The results showed that Indian Patent Office (IPO) has granted 54 dental patents in the last decade. The maximum applications of the IPO processes are the patent co-operation treaty National Phase applications (53.3%), mostly in the bio-engineering field (36.8%). Chiefly, patents were filed by individuals and companies (n = 180) and average time for grant was 4.90 years and 5.34 years, respectively. The process of patent application in India although has become digitalized needs to be more comprehensible and time bound, with more awareness disseminated to entrepreneurs and dental students alike.

Разработка информационного обеспечения принятия решений в области инфохимии на рынке функционального питания

This paper analyzes innovative technologies in the field of functional nutrition. The authors of the study have built a patent landscape that makes it possible to identify the dynamics of technology development, determine the interest of companies in technology, explore the possibility of new companies entering the market and assess the poten- tial for patenting. The focus of the study is the development of scientists in the field of practical application of the bio- logically active and medicinal properties of mushrooms, which make it possible to compensate for the deficiency of macronutrients in the human body. The study made it possible to assess the interest of market players in this area, to identify preferred patent offices, to study key players in the international market, to identify patenting areas and tech- nology segments. This study acts as a basis for studying the technological area, covering key developments.

Predicting Future Promising Technologies Using LSTM

With advances in science and technology and changes in industry, research on promising future technologies has emerged as important. Furthermore, with the advent of a ubiquitous and smart environment, governments and enterprises are required to predict future promising technologies on which new important core technologies will be developed. Therefore, this study aimed to establish science and technology development strategies and support business activities by predicting future promising technologies using big data and deep learning models. The names of the “TOP 10 Emerging Technologies” from 2018 to 2021 selected by the World Economic Forum were used as keywords. Next, patents collected from the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the Science Citation Index (SCI) papers collected from the Web of Science database were analyzed using a time-series forecast. For each technology, the number of patents and SCI papers in 2022, 2023 and 2024 were predicted using the long short-term memory model with the number of patents and SCI papers from 1980 to 2021 as input data. Promising technologies are determined based on the predicted number of patents and SCI papers for the next three years. Keywords characterizing future promising technologies are extracted by analyzing abstracts of patent data collected for each technology and the term frequency-inverse document frequency is measured for each patent abstract. The research results can help business managers make optimal decisions in the present situation and provide researchers with an understanding of the direction of technology development.

Intellectual property strategies for green innovations - An analysis of the European Inventor Awards

To drive sustainability on a global scale for a carbon-neutral future, green innovations and a better understanding of how intellectual property (IP) impacts their research, development, and diffusion are needed. In this paper, we identify IP models adopted by green innovators in three innovation process phases, namely: research; development/commercialization; and diffusion phases, contrasting findings across three organization categories: new ventures; universities; and established firms. Our analysis is based on a qualitative content analysis of 57 green innovations recognized by the European Inventor Award, a highly prestigious international prize awarded annually by the European Patent Office. The analysis shows the degree of openness in IP sharing increasing along the innovation process. Unlike established firms who adopt closed IP models predominantly throughout the innovation process phases, new ventures and universities adopt closed IP models in research and development phases to protect inventions and later share the IP, primarily patents, with others via licensing (exclusive or non-exclusive) to accelerate commercialization and diffusion for broader sustainability impact. The findings point towards a need for interventions at managerial and IP policy level that move beyond incentivizing innovations through exclusivity towards facilitating strategic and collaborative approaches to IP sharing that can accelerate sustainability transitions.

A Trolley Wire De-Icing System

This paper presents a dedicated system for de-icing trolley wires. The proposed issue is appropriately under the protection of intellectual property for solving as described in patent no.B1 230665 PL in the Patent Office of the Republic of Poland. In the solution presented herein, de-icing is achieved mainly by electrodynamic force excitation and secondarily as a result of heating. Because ice is removed primarily through vibrations, it avoids a large consumption of electricity associated with the high specific heat of water. More importantly, operation is nearly simultaneously applied to the total distance of the trolley power grid between two substations. For this reason, it requires less electricity consumption and less time to apply than in heating, mechanical, or chemical methods.

DISCLOSED INVENTIONS ON SCREENING TECHNOLOGIES OF SOLID, HOMOGENEOUS ROCKET PROPELLANT CHARGES

Results of search and analysis of Polish disclosed secret patents on screening (inhibiting) technology of solid, homogeneous rocket propellants, were presented. Due to search on this subject, seven inventions applied by Institute of Organic Chemistry as secret ones to the Polish Patent Office in years 1968-1980, were found. Pieces of information on their disclosure, i.e. about removing secrecy, were published in the News of the Patent Office issued in years 2007-2008.