Recently, H.M. Pharma Consultancy is getting more inquiries concerning our patent reviews: how do we do them? What do I need to do if I want to do the same? Can I join you? Do you have patent reviewer jobs open?
To answer the last question first: No, we do not offer employment of this type. But yes, we would be pleased to crowdsource patent analyses. More about this in a future post.
The second question can be answered in general terms only; it is tantamount to asking, How do I become a scientist? How do I get my research published in journals?
Primarily, it is all about being a biological and pharmaceutical scientist in the first place. It is about staying at the cutting edge of developments in the life science industry, and in the R&D efforts that drives this industry. Moreover, it is about being familiar with the corporate strategies of business development and patenting; the criteria and mechanisms that are imposed by patent law. Most of all, it is about cross-referencing these highly disparate information sources.
As for the first question… here is how we do our patent discussions.
To be clear, it is never only single days. The World Intellectual Property Organization publishes patent applications made under the Patent Convention Treaty (PCT) on a weekly basis, and whenever there is spare time we go through the key data of past weeks’ applications that have an A61K International Patent Code code.
This will produce a batch of 200-300 documents per week, and identifying the interesting ones is the first challenge. Titles and abstracts are often not descriptive of the content – sometimes very deliberately so. However, triage is not exceedingly difficult considering the assignees and their patenting history in the respective field, and in the context of what we know about that field.
We have three major pre-selection categories:
- Applications of general interest. These are candidates for review in Future Science Group’s Pharmaceutical Patent Analyst.
- Applications potentially addressing new uses of known compounds, making them candidates for drug repurposing. Selected examples will be reviewed in the regular special issues of Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.’s ASSAY and Drug Development Technologies.
- Applications related to certain fields, such as transdermal and transmucosal delivery; ocular pharmacology; addiction; and chemical warfare countermeasures. These are set aside for entry into our focused patent databases.
And then the fun begins. More about this in Part 2 of this story.