2020 CRISPR patent landscape – where do we stand?

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna just received a few hours ago the Nobel prize in Chemistry 2020 for “the development of a method of genome editing”, namely their 2012 discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors which basically enables to “cut and paste” DNA. This scientific discovery has fueled an unprecedented biotechnology development in the past 8 years. When we started to analyze the genome editing patent landscape in Spring 2014, there were only 96 patent families(*) in our records in relation with CRISPR. We have now more than 7400 in our latest records – and adding an average of 200 more every month in 2020. What does this data tell us on who has taken advantage in engineering new life sciences solutions out of this amazing scientific discovery, now confirmed worth a Nobel Prize?

Continue reading

IPStudies 10th year anniversary

2020 is such a special year that we almost forgot to celebrate the 10th anniversary of IPStudies patent analytics activities… the local party is postponed to a later, post-COVID date, but we’d still like to take a look back at our first ten years of practice. Back in September 2010, patent mining and landscaping tools were still in their infancy, limited to basic quantitative counts over time and classes. Having experimented the benefit of using patent analytics data to guide R&D as well as M&A development choices in the high-tech corporate world, IPStudies’s founder, Corinne Le Buhan, envisioned the need to bring this information to Swiss technology “grown-ups” as early as possible in their product development cycle. By going beyond the extraction of austere lists of patent numbers to visually highlight their development context, it becomes much easier to benchmark and thus optimize the IP development positioning for companies exposed to highly competitive environments.

Continue reading

Myths and realities on DuPont CRISPR assets

On the agriculture side, IAM just published this week some basic quantitative data analytics spotting DuPont as the leader in CRISPR patent assets. The IAM interview also highlighted some questions about the licensing position of DuPont in the CRISPR patent battle. This was quite surprising to read for us as this information has been publicly known since 2014 and regularly compiled in both our patent and licensing landscapes. Let’s take a closer scrutiny into the DuPont CRISPR assets. In our monitoring of licensing data since 2014, we have actually spotted DuPont Pioneer as one of the earliest player to position their licensing-in in a very strategic way:

Continue reading

Will the CRISPR patent landscape soon move to a one-stop license shopping?

The past 24 hours have brought new light and significant moves in the complex CRISPR patent landscape.

First (that was in European time zone!), our CRISPR expert Fabien Palazzoli celebrated the 1000th CRISPR patent family extraction out of the worldwide published patent databases. Our next monthly update will actually feature more than 1050 classified and categorized CRISPR patent families – more than 10 times the initial set of our first landscape release back in summer 2014!

Continue reading

Genome editing applications – Brussels – Feb 3-4, 2016

IPStudies will be attending the next Genome Editing Applications event in Brussels, now postponed to 3 – 4 February 2016.

A number of companies identified in our CRISPR patent landscape will be speaking there, such as CRISPR Therapeutics (TJ Cradick), Cellectis (Philippe Duchateau), AstraZeneca (Lorenz Mayr), Janssen R&D (Ines Royaux), Novartis (Anett Ritter), Cellecta (Paul Diehl), Merck & Co (Myung Shin), Precision Biosciences (Victor Bartsevitch), as well as instutional applicants such as the Technical University of Denmark, the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Duke University, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and Royal Holloway-University of London.

The event also features a dedicated, interactive evening seminar, discussion and dinner on Intellectual Property and Business Strategy Landscape of Genome Editing Technologies, to be lead by Dr. Philip Webber from Dehns (UK Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys). More information can be found here.

For those attending, we invite you to take this opportunity to meet our head of biotech IP analytics, Dr. Fabien Palazzoli – ask a demo of our interactive CRISPR patent landscape for genome editing R&D/IP positioning! Our free sample can be downloaded here.

 

US inventor veterans at Intellectual Ventures are inventing around CRISPR gene editing

As both patent analysts and strategists, we like to look into the “weak signals” hidden behind the main trends of our landscapes, such as emerging design around solutions, original applications and new unexpected players entering the field.
In our latest update of our CRISPR patent landscape, we were surprised to discover a PCT patent application from a couple of senior inventors from Nathan Myhrvold’s team at Intellectual Ventures.
Continue reading

IP management practices – Findings from the CRISPR-Cas landscape

When initially building our CRISPR-Cas patent landscape database over this summer, we were surprised by some unusual inventor patterns. As we now monitoring deeper into this data subset for our customers, we are further amazed by how some inventors and applicants are already strongly defending their IP position by various means in the diversity of international patent prosecution law practices – an IP management lesson of its own!

Continue reading