Public sector driving personalised medicine research

Public research organisations, primarily in the US, are driving advances in research into genome-related technologies, according to a new report from Marks & Clerk.

The international intellectual property firm’s latest Life Sciences Report shows that US public organisations dominated the list of the top filers of patents for personalised medicine-related inventions between 2003 and 2013.

Marks & Clerk presented their report at the BIO International Convention 2014 in San Diego.

Overall, the gap between the number of patent applications filed by public and private organisations has increased since 2006, the report states.

The US-based National Institutes of Health (NIH) was by far the biggest filer of applications in this time, with 304 patent families filed. But the private sector's Roche was second with 127.

The US is also leading the pack in terms of the number of personalised medicine patent applications per region, with 8382 applications filed between 2003 and 2011. This compares to 2335 for Australia, 4383 for Europe, 2606 for Japan and 2359 for Canada.

During this period, over half of the top five patent applicants’ patent families related to cancer treatment.

In contrast to personalised medicine, where innovation is driven by the public sector, private companies are leading patent applications in the field of sequencing technology.

The largest share of applications again comes from the US, with 2871 filed since 2003. Europe and Japan also feature strongly with 739 and 520 publications respectively.