Vienna, Austria, October 31, 2008 -- Clinical Ophthalmology, a peer-reviewed electronic and print journal covering all subspecialties of eye medicine, has published a full paper on the emerging ocular science and technology module of H.M. Pharma Consultancy's groundbreaking patent database project, THIRDSPACE. The paper presents an extensive profile of international patent disclosures concerning ocular drugs, drug delivery, diagnostics, and tissue technology from 1986 to mid-2008. It also features an exemplary analysis of ocular drug delivery by iontophoresis which demonstrates how patents disclose important information earlier than the peer reviewed literature, and how they provide information that is never published elsewhere.

The Open Access paper can be downloaded free of charge from the “online early” section of the journal's website at http://www.dovepress.com/articles.php?article_id=2517.

“Our ophthalmology patent database module had already been given extensive coverage in the physician and industry journal, Ophthalmology Times Europe, this past summer,” said Dr. Hermann A.M. Mucke, H.M. Pharma Consultancy's owner and general manager. “Now we have the additional opportunity to present this constantly evolving project to the ocular research community at large, in a peer review journal that has just been adopted into MEDLINE coverage. This success will further assist our efforts to provide tailored scientific and intellectual property services to companies working in the ocular business. We also hope that this paper will increase academic awareness of patent disclosures as an invaluable information source that is sadly underused.”

While patent documents have a hierarchical content classification system, these codes do not correspond to the needs of researchers who are not familiar with patenting, and they are not compatible with the search terms used in the public literature database, MEDLINE. Patents are therefore mostly neglected as a resource of information. H.M. Pharma Consultancy's thematically focused THIRDSPACE patent database modules are designed to overcome this dilemma by providing additional MEDLINE-compatible indexing, as well as hyperlinks to the scientific and patent literature cited in patent documents. They also capture many other highly useful metadata, including the number and type of objections in international search reports.