Patents to protect IP
Patenting and Covid-19 Vaccines
Patents have had an important role in organising the collaborations that led to the development and commercialization of COVID-19 vaccines. Patenting is a crucial tool in research-based industries like pharmaceuticals and biologics and can be a means to encourage collaboration. Terms can be negotiated to have different types of expertise combined in one project. The virus will likely garner another sort of PIP-type or any other similar program which will encourage contractual licensing of innovative IP in exchange for access to specialized expertise or important biological data. Monopolisation should clearly be avoided, and patent pooling must be the way forward to obtain sufficient vaccines for Covid-19 as early as possible.
Patent grants up 5.9% at IP5 offices in 2019
Patents played an even more important role in 2019 to protect intellectual property. According to the latest IP5 Statistics Report, the world’s five largest IP offices granted 1.6 million patents in 2019, an increase of 5.9% on the previous year. The total number includes 2.7 million patent applications filed at the IP5 offices in 2019.
The annual patent statistics published by the European Patent Office, the Japan Patent Office, the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the China National Intellectual Property Administration and the United States Patent and Trademark Office were used for this analysis. If you are curious about the 2020 EPO statistics – they will be published in March.