Synthetic Biology - Mapping the Patent Landscape

Abstract

This article presents the global patent landscape for synthetic biology as a new and emerging area of science and technology. The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the emergence of synthetic biology in the patent system and to contribute to future research by providing a high quality tagged core dataset with 7,424 first filings and 71,887 family members. This dataset is intended to assist with evidence based exploration of synthetic biology in the patent system and with advancing methods for the analysis of new and emerging areas of science and technology.The starting point for the research is recognition that traditional methods of patent landscape analysis based on key word searches face limitations when addressing new and emerging areas of science and technology. Synthetic biology can be broadly described as involving the design, synthesis and assembly of biological parts, circuits, pathways, cells and genomes. As such synthetic biology can be understood as emerging from a combination of overlaps and convergences between existing fields and disciplines, such as biotechnology, genetic engineering, protein engineering and systems biology. More precisely, synthetic biology can be understood as the synthetic phase of molecular biology and genetic engineering. This presents the problem that key word strategies may radically overestimate activity because they involve terms that are widely used in underlying fields that are contributing to synthetic biology.In response to this problem we combined anthropology, scientometrics and data science to map authors from scientific publications on synthetic biology into the international patent system. We mapped 10,816 authors into the international patent system and identified 2,450 authors of articles on synthetic biology who are also inventors in the period to December 2017. By combining this data with citation information and a baseline keyword strategy we are able to describe the global patent landscape for synthetic biology and the wider patent universe in which synthetic biology is situated.This article describes the main features of the global landscape and provides the tagged dataset as a contribution to evidence based debate on intellectual property and synthetic biology and methodological development. We anticipate that the data will prove useful in informing international policy debates on synthetic biology under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

Transforming Biodiversity Governance

“…What sets the case of synthetic biology and gene drives apart from the debate on agricultural biotechnology during the 1990s is that, at least for the time being, a significant amount of research and development is being carried out in the public and philanthropic sectors rather than in the for-profit private sector. Patent activity remains relatively limited (Oldham and Hall, 2018). In addition, as synthetic biology technologies become less expensive and more widely accessible, several small-scale, publicly accessible community laboratories, do-it-yourself and open science collaborations are emerging that may lead to a democratization of science (Laird and Wynberg, 2018).…”

How regulatory issues surrounding new breeding technologies can impact smallholder farmer breeding: A case study from the Philippines

“…Several studies show that across the world, the numbers of patents on plants and plant genetic material (King & Schimmelpfennig, 2005;Louwaars et al, 2009;WIPO, 2019), as well as of patents on NBTs (Oldham & Hall, 2018), are rapidly growing. Brinegar et al (2017) showed that the number of patent applications filed in gene-editing technologies increased 15-fold since 2005, while Martin-Laffon et al ( 2019) showed the steep rise in the number of patents to be related to the application of the CRISPR gene-editing technology in different parts of the world, with China and the United States being far ahead.…”

“…Brinegar et al (2017) showed that the number of patent applications filed in gene-editing technologies increased 15-fold since 2005, while Martin-Laffon et al ( 2019) showed the steep rise in the number of patents to be related to the application of the CRISPR gene-editing technology in different parts of the world, with China and the United States being far ahead. Oldham and Hall (2018) showed that the number of countries in which patent applicants seek protection for their inventions in the field of synthetic biology is growing as well.…”

“…The main scientific breakthroughs in crop biotechnology, from the development of recombinant DNA in 1971 to the current NBTs, are made by researchers in public research institutions, after which the private sector steps in by further investments and product development (WIPO, 2019). This also applies to the field of NBTs (Friedrichs et al, 2019;Martin-Laffon et al, 2019;Oldham & Hall, 2018). It is to be expected that current developments will fit into a longer trend, in which a few multinational companies have become to hold the major share of biotechnology patents.…”

“…Gene-editing technologies, in particular, the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology, provide breeders with unprecedented tools to generate variations at specific target sites in the genome of any plant. The use of gene-editing technologies is quickly spreading around the globe and so is the number of patents on these technologies (Martin-Laffon et al, 2019;Oldham & Hall, 2018). In addition, the legislation and regulation of genomeedited plants is equally evolving rapidly in many countries in order to adjust the legal realm to the new technologies (Schmidt et al, 2020).…”