Robert Gleave, intellectual property consultant at Coller IP, advocates making optimum use of available data to underpin business strategy
The pharmaceutical and biotech industries have undergone rapid change in recent years, partly in response to well documented challenges facing the industry, but also due to shifts in technology - such as from small molecule development to biologics - and the ever increasing amounts of data available to research organisations.
It is of key importance for research companies, and those supporting aspects of the drug development process, to be aware of longer term trends in technological, clinical and regulatory environment within the industry. This enables strategic plans to be put in place and to make sure that future product offerings are aligned to market or industry needs. One strategy to increase industry awareness and to support business planning is to have a structured approach to analysis of emerging patent literature.
It is good practice for businesses to regularly monitor the publication of new patent applications from key competitors. This can help to rapidly identify new potentially disruptive technologies and therefore enable a response strategy to be developed. Emerging patent literature can also help point to areas of synergistic research and identify potential collaborators or new markets. Once identified, potentially high impact patent applications should be monitored to assess progress in patent prosecution and to determine strategies for opposition if necessary.
It is also important to monitor and analyse broader trends in patent filings across the industry, for example with by picking out areas of high research activity, and therefore those areas where others are investing their time and money. This broader analysis can be a significant challenge in the pharmaceutical sector due to the sheer quantity of patent filings. For example, the top 25 pharmaceutical companies (by 2013 sales) and their subsidiaries have filed over 17,000 new patent families in the last five years.
There are a number of complementary ways in which an experienced patent analyst can extract trends from such data sets. Patent classification codes are used by patent examiners to link new applications to one or more technical fields. Some classification schemes, such as the Cooperative Patent Classification system used by the European and US patent offices, offer a high degree of granularity, and therefore enable the stratification of large patent sets into specific technical fields of interest. As a simple example, the 17,000 patent families identified above can be split using classification codes to show that approximately 37% of the families relate to small molecules, 24% to biologics, 11% to medical devices and 8% to methods of diagnosis.
The analysis of classification codes can also extract information relating to emerging areas of interest in the pharmaceutical sector and the key players involved. For example, the use of location-based services is an area of increasing interest for patient engagement, remote monitoring and collecting real time patient data. An analysis of relevant patent classification codes indicates that the top pharma companies have filed over 300 families in this area in the last five years, with Roche being the most active patenting entity.
Large patent sets can also be analysed to look for those patents which have been highly cited by other patent applicants or examiners. These documents can represent important or breakthrough technologies which have been used as a basis for the development further technological advances, although it is important to for a patent analyst to carefully analyse the results such a citation analysis. Amongst the most highly cited patent families from the top pharma set include patents relate to HCV inhibitors and blood glucose measurement devices.
A useful tool in the broader analysis of patent sets is the generation and analysis of patent landscape maps. These maps are typically generated through term frequency analysis and other algorithms to cluster documents relating to shared themes. The output is a visualisation of the patent space with patents arranged in map ‘contours’ which indicated the density of the cluster patents. Such maps can be useful to identify key areas of patenting activity, the major patenting entities in a particular technology space, and can be time-sliced to show trends in patent filing over a set period. One way to achieve this kind of insight is to appoint an external expert, who can work with a business who can develop a focussed patent search and analysis strategy, the results of which can enhance strategic business planning.
While most businesses are unlikely to be interested in a whole sector analysis, the techniques discussed above can readily be applied to a focussed set of patent families within an industry sub-sector or particular research field.
In summary, it is vital for businesses in high tech industries such as pharma and biotech to keep track of both their competitor’s activities as well as trends more generally within the market. It is therefore important to develop a structured approach to the identification and analysis of emerging patent data.