Fighting coronavirus – how the EPO is assisting innovation in technologies useful to combat COVID-19
By launching the “Fighting coronavirus” platform, the EPO has promoted the role of patents as a driver for innovation. Patents not only create incentives for companies and universities to invest in research, but also provide inventors with a rich source of technical information, often published nowhere else. In addition, technologies that have been developed in response to earlier pandemics and/or in relation to other (corona)viruses prove useful for the current Covid-19 pandemic.
The platform is seeking to speed up the dissemination of patent information to researchers and policy makers in order to combat SARS-CoV-2. EPO patent examiners with expertise in the relevant technologies, as well as patent analysts, have developed a series of search strategies to facilitate searching for and identifying patents on technologies that are useful in combating the virus or treating the disease it causes. Over 180 datasets with search strategies relating to vaccines and therapeutics, diagnostics and analytics, and informatics, including computational approaches for genetic- and protein-related data processing (bioinformatics) as well as digital technologies specifically adapted for the handling or processing of medical or healthcare data (healthcare informatics), have ben compiled. Patent analytics are also available for the datasets; these display the top applicants and inventors as well as global or European maps showing patent filings by country.
The search strategies are designed to run on Espacenet, the EPO’s free-to-use online patent tool that contains over 120 million published patent applications from over 100 global patent authorities, but can also be run on your own patent platform. You can also analyse the datasets yourself.
For more information, visit: https://www.epo.org/news-events/in-focus/fighting-coronavirus.html