In this last part of the workflow description that we started on November 24 and continued on December 14, we discuss how we evaluate and comment the international life science patent applications that we have selected and analyzed. These commentaries need to be concise – 200-250 words on average – because we pick 12-15 documents for each issue of the Pharmaceutical Patent Analyst, and of course space is limited.
First, a bit of specific background is required to introduce the subject matter. As has been mentioned, many of our chosen examples are not exactly in the center of the mainstream, and it is unlikely that the majority of our audience will be instantly familiar with, say, the pathways where myeloid differentiation primary response protein 88 is involved; nor are we ourselves omniscient geniuses. We don’t need to be; that’s what PubMed and the other online literature databases are for. And so we compile a few sentences, and underpin them with two or three peer review references.
Then the core part: why and how does this go beyond the state of the art, and why is it of particular interest? How did the inventors approach and solve the problem? That pretty much amounts to writing the abstract for a paper, but compressed into two or three sentences.
Finally, wrapping it up: essential for putting the subject matter perspective. Who else is immediately competing? (That requires a brief but very focused literature and patent search. Of course we also run it through our internal databases, and feed the patent data back into these resources.) Is there a paper that can be regarded as a peer review companion – i.e., did some or all of the inventors publish part or all of what the patent document is about? Did they perhaps ignore some crucial prior art (as reflected in peer review papers, IP documents, and other public sources) that clearly negates novelty, and if so, did the patent office examiner make the proper citations? (You would be surprised how often even both omissions are evident in PCT documents. Remember, these are international applications, not granted patents.) If we have ultimately shot down one application or the other, we won’t say sorry. The patent system is supposed to serve the dissemination of novelty.
This cycle of document selection, analysis, and discussion repeats every two months.
Analyzing life science patent documents for novelty is sometimes tedious, and sometimes it is fun; but it is always fascinating. The methodology of doing it has become routine; but never the content.