Quantity vs. quality: an assessment of the current pipeline for rabies

Abstract

objectives To gain insight in the potential of the current pipeline for rabies to decrease the burden of disease by evaluating its relevance to high-risk countries.methods Rabies-related patent documents and clinical trials were retrieved from Espacenet and the WHO ICTRP, respectively. Data were cleaned, modulated and categorised into a pre-defined set of indicators those were used for (statistical) analyses on the number of patent applications, patent quality and type of stakeholders involved for different geographical areas.results Analysis of 583 unique patent families applied for in the period 1954-2017 showed a steep growth in the yearly number of patent applications. A significant portion of new patent applications concern Chinese patents with relatively low quality that are filed by a dispersed group of applicants. Excluding these patents, the number of patent applications has been virtually stable over the years. A shift is seen in public stakeholders becoming more prolific as patent applicants. This shift is also reflected in clinical trials; key sponsors of clinical trials include public and private stakeholders originating from high-risk rabies countries. The majority of clinical trials investigate adjustments to existing vaccines that may improve accessibility.conclusion The results show a discrepancy between the quantity and quality of rabies patent applications that reflects national patent regulations rather than real progress in decreasing the burden of disease. This is in contrast to clinical trials, which focus on incremental innovations that are tested in clinical trials but may nevertheless have a potentially strong impact in high-risk countries.

Identifying the gaps in human and veterinary chlamydia vaccine development

“…Most inventions in the pharmaceutical sector are covered by patents as they are the only way of offering solid intellectual property protection of new pharmaceutical compounds. 15 Clinical trials represent late-stage drug development that all new inventions must pass before market entry, which make clinical trials a reliable indicator of the short-term market entry. However, a significant share of inventions disclosed in patents will not enter clinical testing due to disappointing research results, or due to strategic reasons.…”

“…The final list of 189 patents was further analyzed to visualize time and geographical trends. In line with criteria for asssessing quantity over quality 15 , we also looked into high quality patents, here defined as being cited more times.…”

Probiotics for the Management of Infectious Diseases: Reviewing the State of the Art

“…To identify relevant clinical studies, the EU clinical trials register (CTR.eu), the United States NLM database (CT.gov), and the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) were queried, as these are regularly updated and contain records of clinical trials from 202 countries, covering a total of 17 different clinical trial databases ( World Health Organization, 2021 ). The selection of these databases is in line with previous research in this field ( Ramezanpour et al, 2015 ; Janse et al, 2020 ; Neevel et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Analogous to these sales estimates, it was found that Asia and North America were the most popular locations for clinical trials and patent applications. According to Neevel et al (2020) , the location of patent applications is closely related to expected profit, as the costs of patent filing and maintenance are very high. Lower-income countries were less frequently reported as the patent application and clinical trial locations.…”

Innovations in the veterinary intestinal health field: A patent landscape analysis

“…Given the high costs related to patenting, there is a direct relation between the location of patent applications and target markets. Patents are generally only applied for in countries where they are expected to bring a substantial economic benefit, either by generating revenues or by preventing competitors to enter the market [ 33 ]. Patent families for which only documents with kind codes belonging to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) or European Patent Office (EPO) were categorized as a separate group.…”