9 February 2012
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Leading Australian intellectual property law firm, Griffith Hack has partnered with patent analyst specialists Ambercite to apply sophisticated analysis, to hone in on the leading patents and pharmaceutical companies in a newly released report on Alzheimer's treatments.
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Entitled ‘Clearing the fog: Patenting trends for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease’, the white paper has applied NPA to 48,000 patents in the area of Alzheimer's treatments to show the leading patents, patenting areas, patent owners and inventors.
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Alzheimer’s is a major disease of the elderly, with up to one in four people aged 85 and above suffering from this condition. Besides affecting sufferers, and their carers and families, Alzheimer’s also imposes a significant economic cost on society, which has been estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
In response, the pharmaceutical industry has invested heavily in developing new drugs to tackle Alzheimer’s, with a broad range of compounds being developed or investigated. This significant attention is being protected by patent filings, with over 48,000 patents filed to protect potential Alzheimer’s treatments.
In the white paper, the leading 2153 patents were analysed to show that:
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- Research and development focus has centred on two areas, namely drugs targeted to the beta amyloid protein (‘Amyloid Grouping’, and comprising 39% of the leading 2153 patents), and drugs targeted to the Tau and serotonin and other alternative pathways (‘Tau Grouping’, comprising 33%).
- The leading subject clusters in each of these two groupings are ‘Peptides and antibodies targeting β amyloid’ in the Amyloid Grouping, and ‘GSK-3 – Tau fibrillation inhibition/Hormonal and kinase inhibitory mechanisms’ in the Tau Grouping.
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- Filing activity for the 2153 strongest patents peaked between the year 2000 and 2005, with a double peak of filing activity for the Amyloid Grouping (around the year 2000 and then around the year 2005).
- Many of the most highly ranked patents revealed in this study referred to the development of drugs for multiple diseases. In many of these patents, treatment of Alzheimer’s was claimed or mentioned as only being a possible application or even of secondary importance. This may be because pharmaceutical companies often develop drugs for a particular biological target (rather than a specific disease) whose regulation may be important in the treatment of several disease states.
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Combined with the broad range of subject matter for the patent clusters, this suggests that Alzheimer’s treatments are still undergoing strong development. This seems appropriate when we consider that there is still no proven successful treatment or cure for Alzheimer’s.
Overall, the report shows that Alzheimer’s research to be very strong with a high rate of recent activity. This report is also the best publically available demonstration yet of the advanced ability of NPA to precisely filter, cluster and rank patents, an ability we have also seen in a variety of client studies covering a broad range of technologies.
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Click here to access the white paper.
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Click here to listen to Amanda and Mike speak with BRR Media about the results of this white paper. Click here to see Amanda and Mike on Sky Business News.
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For further information, please contact:
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