United States Patent Trademark Office Research Articles

Technological evolution of internal combustion engine vehicle: A patent data analysis

Current mobility is highly dependent on fossil fuels which are the energy vectors of internal combustion engines, which power more than 99% of all road vehicles. In order to reduce pollutant emissions from ever growing urban centers, electric vehicles have emerged and their importance is growing steeply. However, these still face several problems regarding energy supply, storage and production, as well as life-cycle CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, there is a large fleet of vehicles with a vast majority of combustion-based power plants that need to be improved for a proper transition to total electrification. Therefore, it is essential that the remaining internal combustion engines become more efficient and sustainable energy conversion devices. For policy and business decision makers, understanding the trends of evolution is essential to making appropriate decisions. Thus, this study aimed at mapping the technological evolution of internal combustion engine and at understanding the main trends through patent data. The current stage of technological maturity was determined through a Logistics model, and the subtechnologies with the greatest potential for development and diffusion were analyzed. The search for the data was performed through Questel Orbit platform, in the United States Patent Trademark Office database. In 2018, internal combustion engine had a technological maturity rate of 81.77%. The subtechnologies that have the highest diffusion speed, among those compared, are: friction loss (32.14), water injection (21.05) and hybrid technology (20.88). It is forecast that internal combustion engines have approximately 27 years of estimated remaining time for saturation in the number of patent families.

Anti-EGFR Binding Nanobody Delivery System to Improve the Diagnosis and Treatment of Solid Tumours.

Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) and members of its homologous protein family mediate transmembrane signal transduction by binding to a specific ligand, which leads to regulated cell growth, differentiation, proliferation and metastasis. With the development and application of Genetically Engineered Antibodies (GEAs), Nanobodies (Nbs) constitute a new research hot spot in many diseases. A Nb is characterized by its low molecular weight, deep tissue penetration, good solubility and high antigen-binding affinity, the anti-EGFR Nbs are of significance for the diagnosis and treatment of EGFR-positive tumours. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the information about the molecular structure of EGFR and its transmembrane signal transduction mechanism, and discuss the anti-EGFR-Nbs influence on the diagnosis and treatment of solid tumours. Data were obtained from PubMed, Embase and Web of Science. All patents are searched from the following websites: the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO®), the United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO®) and Google Patents. EGFR is a key target for regulating transmembrane signaling. The anti-EGFR-Nbs for targeted drugs could effectively improve the diagnosis and treatment of solid tumours. EGFR plays a role in transmembrane signal transduction. The Nbs, especially anti- EGFR-Nbs, have shown effectiveness in the diagnosis and treatment of solid tumours. How to increase the affinity of Nb and reduce its immunogenicity remain a great challenge.

Novel Selective Histone Deacetylase 6 (HDAC6) Inhibitors: A Patent Review (2016-2019).

Many human diseases are associated with dysregulation of HDACs. HDAC6 exhibits deacetylase activity not only to histone protein but also to non-histone proteins such as α- tubulin, HSP90, cortactin, and peroxiredoxin. These unique functions of HDAC6 have gained significant attention in the medicinal chemistry community in recent years. Thus a great deal of effort has devoted to developing selective HDAC6 inhibitors for therapy with the hope to minimize the side effects caused by pan-HDAC inhibition. The review intends to analyze the structural feature of the scaffolds, to provide useful information for those who are interested in this field, as well as to spark the future design of the new inhibitors. The primary tool used for patent searching is SciFinder. All patents are retrieved from the following websites: the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO®), the United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO®), Espacenet®, and Google Patents. The years of patents covered in this review are between 2016 and 2019. Thirty-six patents from seventeen companies/academic institutes were classified into three categories based on the structure of ZBG: hydroxamic acid, 1,3,4-oxadiazole, and 1,2,4-oxadiazole. ZBG connects to the cap group through a linker. The cap group can tolerate different functional groups, including amide, urea, sulfonamide, sulfamide, etc. The cap group appears to modulate the selectivity of HDAC6 over other HDAC subtypes. Selectively targeting HDAC6 over other subtypes represents two fold advantages: it maximizes the pharmacological effects and minimizes the side effects seen in pan-HDAC inhibitors. Many small molecule selective HDAC6 inhibitors have advanced to clinical studies in recent years. We anticipate the approval of selective HDAC6 inhibitors as therapeutic agents in the near future.

Cannabis Trademarks and the First Amendment

A review of Supreme Court trademark litigation interpreting the First Amendment as well as recent trademark litigation at the state and federal levels. The prohibition on immoral trademarks has been steadily eroding as a result of First Amendment litigation at the United States Supreme Court. In light of recent Supreme Court decisions on trademark registrations and free speech, the question then becomes: Is the ban on cannabis trademark registrations justifiable in light of the First Amendment in view of these recent cases? The issue of whether the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) should or will issue registrations in light of this recent line of cases is discussed.

Novel Small Molecule Inhibitors of Programmed Cell Death (PD)-1, and its Ligand, PD-L1 in Cancer Immunotherapy: A Review Update of Patent Literature.

In the last few decades, cancer immunotherapy has been extensively researched, and novel checkpoint signaling mechanisms involving Programmed Death (PD)-1 and PDLigand 1 (PD-L1) receptors have been targeted. The PD-1/PD-L1 binding and interaction play a critical role in the development of malignancies. The present review focuses on recent patents on the pharmacological and biological cancerregulating properties of PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors involved in immunotherapeutic cancer drug development. Thorough patent literature search published during the last seven years, including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO®), United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO®), Espacenet®, and Google Patents, to identify PD-1/PD-L1-targeting small molecule immunomodulators. Several small molecule PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors were patented for regulation of tumor progression by academic and industry-associated investigators. Most of the claimed patents have been validated and confined to in vitro and in vivo mouse models limiting their entry into clinical settings. Majority of the patents are claimed by the researchers at Aurigene Ltd. (India) on novel peptidomimetic compounds. It is worth to be noted that macrocyclic compounds such as the peptides QP20, HD20, WQ20, SQ20, and CQ-22 from Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) Company, biaryl, and heterocyclic derivatives including 1,3-dihydroxy-phenyl compounds were efficient in regulating the PD-1/PD-L1 protein-protein binding and interaction compared to those of the approved monoclonal antibodies. PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors show significant anti-cancer responses as stand-alone agents and in combination with other cancer therapies. More efficient experimental studies and clinical trials are necessary to evaluate the host-tumor cells' interactions. Understanding the cancer microenvironment, and identifying specific biomarkers and X-ray crystalline structures of PD-1/PD-L1 complexes, including molecular and genomic signature studies are essential to determine the feasibility of PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors for development into drug-like cancer immunotherapeutics.

Office Actions per Grant Ratio (OGR): A New Metric for Patent Examiner Activity

The current metric for examiner prosecution activity is allowance rate, which is calculated by dividing the total number of allowances by the sum of the allowances and abandonments (allowance rate = total allowance/(total allowances total abandonments)). Importantly, however, allowance rates do not consider an examiner’s pending docket. Specifically, allowance rates do not fully capture if the examiner is simply writing office actions thereby prolonging prosecution or allowing cases. This study rectifies this failure by creating and analyzing a dataset that captures every active examiner’s current docket. Calculating the Office Action per Grant Ratio (OGR = Total # of Office Actions/Total # of Grants), this study’s new metric for measuring patent examiner activity captures not only pending cases, but also helps decipher which examiners are spending their time allowing cases or writing Office Actions. This new metric indirectly helps determine if specific examiners are prolonging prosecution compared with peers within their Art Unit, Workgroup and Technology Center. Using the OGR score, this study elucidates how examiners in certain art units and Workgroups behave- specifically, which examiners in certain art units are more likely to write office actions or allow cases. To calculate the OGR, this study captures 8,537,660 office actions, 2,812,177 granted patents and 1,255,552 abandonments from 9,535 examiners from January 1, 2001 to June 8, 2017. This study finds that, overall, there is a wide range of OGR scores across the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), commonly ranging from approximately 0.2 to 23. Furthermore, overall, most examiners have an OGR of 3.0 or below, which means that most examiners write 3 Office Actions before granting a patent. These OGR scores roughly correlate to allowance rates, but there are a significant number of examiners that do not have an allowance rate that corresponds with OGR scores. There are more examiners with high OGR scores in Technology Centers 1600 and 1700, which may reflect the complex nature associated with biotechnology and chemical patents. In contrast, there are a higher number of examiners with low OGR scores in Technology Center 2800, which corresponds to Semiconductors, Electrical and Optical Systems and Components. Interestingly, when broken down into Workgroups, this study finds that there can be large variation in OGR scores. For example, in Technology Center 1600, workgroups 1610 and 1620 have a disproportionate number of examiners with high OGR scores. Similarly, in Technology Center 3600, Workgroups 3620 and 3680 have many examiners with high OGR scores, which is unsurprising since both Workgroups encompass “Data Processing: Financial, Business Practice, Management, or Cost/Price Determination” or business methods type applications.

Looking at Patent Law: A Case Study Regarding the Patenting of a Plating Cell Invention, Part I — From Conception to Published Patent Application

This installment of the semi-regular column on patent law presents part one of a case study of an electrochemical cell invention. The case study begins with the preparation of an invention disclosure for review by management of the organization or the university technology transfer office. Once the decision to file a patent application is approved, the invention disclosure is the initial document used for interaction with patent counsel. The patent counsel generally drafts the patent application for review by the inventor(s) and submission to the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). In addition, patent counsel manages the interaction between the inventor(s) and the USPTO. Part one concludes with the publication of the patent application. The intent of the authors is that the subject case study will enable electrochemical scientists, engineers, and technologists to better understand the invention to patent application process.

토픽모델을 이용한 SCM 특허분석: 1997~2016

We used Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA) for topic model generation to investigate the hidden topics and trends of SCM patents between 1997 and 2016. We analyzed 2,724 abstracts of patents from USPTO(United States Patent & Trademark Office) and EPO(European Patent Office) that were retrieved from KIPRIS database using keywords on supply chain management.BR Major findings of this study provided the 15 major topics such as RFID System, Logistics, Communication System, Web 2.0, Network Service and Maintenance, etc. and identified the four cold topics(Web 2.0, Logistics, Enterprise Application Integration, Supply Planning/Network Service and Maintenance) and five hot topics(Mobile Communication, RFID System, Tracking System, Digital Signal Processor) in SCM patents. Contributions and further research were also discussed as a part of the conclusions.BR

Evaluating the patenting activities of pharmaceutical research organizations based on new technology indices

Several citation-based indicators, including patent h-index, have been introduced to evaluate the patenting activities of research organizations. However, variants developed to complement h-index have not been utilized yet in the domain of intellectual property management. The main purpose of this study is to propose new indices that can be used to evaluate the patenting activities of research and development (R&D) organizations, based on h-type complementary variants along with traditional indicators. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used to identify those indices. By applying the proposed framework to pharmaceutical R&D organizations, which have their patents registered in the United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO), the following three indices are obtained: the forward citation, impact per unit time, and patent family factors. The ranking obtained from the new indices can represent the productive capacity of the qualified patent, patent commercialization speed, and patent commercialization effort of research organizations. The new proposed indices in this study are expected to contribute to the evaluation of the patenting activities of R&D organizations from various perspectives.

Analyzing technological convergence trends in a business ecosystem

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for understanding core technological competencies and identifying the trends on the technological convergence of a business ecosystem using the patent information of leading firms in the system. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed framework is composed of two steps: time-sequential text clustering analysis for comprehending changes in general technological fields and association rule analysis for identifying the trends of convergences in each field. The authors applied the proposed framework to the patents applied to United States Patent Trademark Office by Samsung Electronics, a market leader of the electronics industry, during the period from 2000 to 2011. Findings – In the sequential text clustering analysis, trends of 14 technological fields such as data storage medium and data processing, mobile, lights and heats and memory are identified. Moreover, changes of technological convergence in each field are identified using association rule analysis. For instance, in the case of technologies related to lights and heats, convergences occurred between radio transmission systems and modulated-carrier systems during the period from 2000 to 2001. However, recent convergences appeared between technologies regarding controlling lights and liquid crystal materials since 2008. Originality/value – Utilization of the framework will suggest new business opportunities to SMEs in a business ecosystem by identifying the trends of technological convergences.

Assessing Innovations in Cloud Security

The goals of this paper are to analyze the ongoing trends in innovation related to security in cloud computing, and to identify areas for improvement. To this end, we collect all cloud security patent applications (about 512 patent applications) from the United States Patent Trademark Office (USPTO) and apply data mining techniques to their titles. This allows us to identify unique keywords that these patent applications share, and to apply social network analysis to study the relationships between them. We then use cluster analysis to uncover specific focal innovation areas that correspond to the well-known confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA) triad, thus complementing the USPTO classification of cloud security innovations. Our results reveal in particular that the area of cloud availability is under-investigated, suggesting that more innovation is needed on this front.

Review of Recent Patents on Wearable Movement Sensors

Advances in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), solid-state, wireless, and battery technologies have made possible the development of a new generation of portable, low-power, wireless, and high-capacity movement sensors with significant potential in a variety of medical applications. This article includes a review of recent patents focused on novel wearable movement sensors appropriate for biomedical applications involving motion capture, activity recognition, and objective analysis of movement disorders. The paper focuses on the technical challenges associated with the hardware design of these devices in the context of movement disorders, and the solutions disclosed in patents and patent applications. Additionally, the paper provides a discussion of future developments and the outstanding technical challenges that would need to be overcome for the widespread use of movement sensors in research and clinical settings. Our patent search revealed that a total of 958 issued patents and 664 patent applications have been published by the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) in subclass US600/595 (body monitoring). Since 2007, 34 patents were issued and 342 patent applications were published (378 patent publications) in this subclass, indicating that nearly 25% of the patented or patent pending developments in movement monitoring occurred in the last 3.5 years. Despite the significant developments in this area, none of the patent publications analyzed disclosed wearable movement sensors that overcome some of the most significant technical challenges such as the problem of wireless synchronization of sampling times among multiple sensors. Consequently, valuable intellectual property remains to be developed and claimed in future patents in this technical field. Keywords: Actigraphers, activity monitoring, inertial measurement units (IMUs), inertial sensors, orientation measurement unit (OMUs), movement sensors, motion capture, movement disorders, robust wireless data transfer, wearable sensors.

International Harmonization of Substantive Patent Law - What Does It Mean for Patent Drawings?

Among others, the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) is moving towards harmonizing patent standards. Many rules for patent drawings have already been revised to correspond with those of the European Patent Office (EPO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).The rule change to make computer generated drawings permissible, provided they are executed in a manner that permits clear reproduction and copying, we feel makes perfect sense.

Patenteamento em nanotecnologia: estudo do setor de materiais poliméricos nanoestruturados

Neste trabalho foi feito um estudo de tendências tecnológicas em nanotecnologia aplicado ao setor de materiais poliméricos, com base em informações extraídas de documentos de patentes. Foi usada como fonte de dados o banco de patentes da USPTO (United States Patent Trademark Office). Os dados foram obtidos via web, utilizando-se diversas palavras-chaves Foram mapeados os principais países depositantes, tipo de depositante e ano de aplicação, setores de aplicação, tipos de polímeros utilizados e principais aditivos e cargas incorporados às matrizes poliméricas.

Patenting cDNA 1993: efforts and happenings

The National Institute of Health (NIH) and Dr.J.C. Venter applied for patents for the sequences of cDNA fragments from a brain library. The scientific community objected strenuously on emotional grounds. The NIH argues that these sequences might never be patentable even when completed. The issue became an international one with the British applying for patents to protect their position while the French, Italians and Japanese vowed not to patent cDNA. The United States Patent Trademark Office (US PTO) strongly rejected the NIH's application. The NIH is appealing the decision.