Bacteriophage as an antibacterial agent: a patent perspective

The present review encompasses a patent landscape on bacteriophage as an antimicrobial agent and one of the alternatives to combat antibiotic resistance in bacteria. This study gives a perspective on use of bacteriophages in various industries such as healthcare, food safety and animal and plant protection. Patenting activity was noted for all the antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens listed in the ‘critical’ category by the WHO. Broadly, claims of the analyzed patents were directed toward bacteriophage, composition/formulation containing phage, phage proteins and various methods of using or producing phage. The challenges to approval of phage therapy in clinical use may be overcome with the help of focused research and modification of the regulatory guidelines for phage therapy.

The Patent System, Assistive Technologies, and the Developing World

Although many assistive devices are created in advanced economies, the developing world has been responsible for numerous creative solutions. Despite this, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the clear majority of patenting activity in this field occurs in developed countries. Developing countries, which generate comparatively few issued patents, engage in significant innovation using forms of creativity that are not rewarded under the Global North’s patent standards. Developing nations can respond to this circumstance through a number of mechanisms. One is to modify the existing patentability standards to capture more types of creative endeavors. Such an approach should be considered thoughtfully, as the patent system has the potential for both positive and negative consequences for developing nations. Alternatively, nations can adopt other forms of incentives (such as grants or other rewards) to encourage the development of new assistive technologies for their domestic creators.

Orthopaedic device innovation in South Africa: A study of patenting activity

We assessed knowledge development and exchange among actors who patent orthopaedic devices in South Africa over the period 2000–2015. A social network analysis was performed on bibliometric data using co-inventorship on patents as an indicator of collaboration between different organisations, with a focus on the spatial and sectoral contexts. Network metrics and innovation system indices are used to describe knowledge development and exchange. The results show that university, healthcare and industry organisations have primarily been responsible for increased patenting over time. The key actors were a set of industry actors – a national actor and its US partner – who have patented many devices jointly. National universities were found to make a small contribution, and science councils were found to be absent, despite the efforts in the changing innovation landscape to encourage publicly financed research organisations to protect their intellectual property. The collaboration networks were found to be sparse and disjointed, with many actors – largely from the private healthcare sector – patenting in isolation.

Trends and characteristics of patenting activity in Poland in 1990–2018

Patenting activity is broadly analysed in the literature at the micro, mezzo, and macroeconomic levels. Yet, not much attention regarding this issue is devoted to European countries in transition. The main aim of the study is a quantitative analysis of all patent applications filed with and grants issued by the Polish Patent Office throughout the period of 1990– 2018 at the aggregate and regional level. We investigate trends and factors determining the patenting activity in Poland – the country at an advanced level of the economic and social transition. The empirical analysis leads to several findings. First of all, we identify changes in the field of patenting related to Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004, which resulted in the increase of residents’ patenting activity and decrease of that of non-residents (in terms of the number of filed applications and granted patents at a national and regional level). This holds for absolute numbers as well as for a per capita perspective. Additionally, we demonstrate that the increase in R&D expenditure is not followed by a proportional increase in patenting, as the patent-to- R&D ratio is systematically shrinking. Finally, the study compares trends in patenting activity in Poland with those in different groups of countries, proving that the dynamic of change in Poland is much slower than could be expected.

Back to the past: the historical roots of labor-saving automation

This paper, relying on a still relatively unexplored long-term dataset on U.S. patenting activity, provides empirical evidence on the history of labor-saving innovations back to early nineteenth century. The identification of mechanization/automation heuristics, retrieved via textual content analysis on current robotic technologies by Montobbio et al. (Robots and the origin of their labour-saving impact, LEM Working Paper Series 2020/03), allows to focus on a limited set of CPC codes where mechanization and automation technologies are more prevalent. We track their time evolution, clustering, eventual emergence of wavy behavior, and their comovements with long-term GDP growth. Our results challenge both the general-purpose technology approach and the strict 50-year Kondratiev cycle, while they provide evidence of the emergence of erratic constellations of heterogeneous technological artefacts, in line with the development-block approach enabled by autocatalytic systems.