Relating patenting and peer-review publications: an extended perspective on the vascular health and risk management literature

Abstract

Purpose:This investigation identifies patent applications published under the international Patent Convention Treaty between July 2010 and January 2011 in three significant fields of vascular risk management (arterial hypertension, atherosclerosis, and aneurysms) and investigates whether the inventors have also published peer reviewed papers directly describing their claimed invention.Results:Out of only 48 patent documents that specifically addressed at least one of the above-mentioned fields, 15 had immediate companion papers of which 13 were published earlier than the corresponding patent applications; the majority of these papers were published by noncorporate patentees. Although the majority of patent applications (30 documents) had at least one corporate assignee, 18 came from academic environments. As expected, medical devices dominated in the aneurysm segment while pharmacology dominated hypertension and atherosclerosis.Conclusion:Although information related to hypertension, atherosclerosis, or aneurysms that was claimed in international patent applications reached the public quicker through the corresponding peer review document if one was published, more than two-thirds of the patent applications had no such companion paper in a scientific journal. The patent literature, which is freely available online as full text, offers information to scientists and developers in the fields of vascular risk management that is not available from the peer reviewed literature.

Active Dry Yeast: Lessons from Patents and Science

“…Only a single case was found where scientists described their invention in a peer-reviewed scientific publication (Chen, Cooper, & Gutmanis, 1966). That number is obviously much lower than the 15 companion papers published, for 6 months only, between July 2010 and January 2011, from information previously disclosed in 48 patent Composites (84) Properties (81) Drying processes (124) Protectants (128) Strains; growth (75) specifications related to vascular health and risk management, for example (Mucke, 2011).…”

A patente como fonte de informação (des)necessária para a Biotecnologia em Saúde

“…Entretanto, o desconhecimento, por parte dos pesquisadores, acerca das características técnicas e científicas de um documento de patente perpetua o desinteresse desses profissionais por esse tipo de fonte de informação (FRANÇA, 2007;MUCKE, 2011).…”

Free sources for patent searching

“…Well, evidence is not prolific, but Bregonje looked at chemical patents in 2005 and concluded that ‘if information is disclosed first in a patent, it is often the only source of that information’ with anywhere between 40 per cent and 77 per cent uniqueness, depending on the area of chemistry (Bregonje, 2005). In the medical area, Mucke concluded for vascular health patent applications, ‘more than two-thirds of the patent applications had no such companion paper in a scientific journal’ (Mucke, 2011).…”