Tuesday 14 Oct

There is no such thing as a truly original idea! New science is built on the work of the past. Knowing the history is essential to develop a better insight for future breakthroughs. The mastery of knowledge developed by previous researchers aides in choosing the right path and quickening the process to success. Scientific knowledge continues to grow and overflow. Peer reviewed scientific literature continues to be the prime resource for accessing worldwide scientific knowledge. This presentation will cover how today’s biological research is benefitting from connecting and combining these borrowed ideas.

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) and PerkinElmer Inc. are partnering on the integration of PerkinElmer’s ChemBioDraw Ultra®, a digital scientific drawing tool and CAS’ SciFinder®, a research discovery application that accesses CAS databases for chemistry and related scientific information. CAS’ new Application Programming Interface (API) technology will make it possible for ChemBioDraw users to initiate a chemical substance or reaction search in SciFinder from within the ChemBioDraw interface. APIs are a critical delivery mechanism for future data needs that enable workflow integration of data and services. Built on industry standard API conventions, CAS is currently working with key customers to integrate SciFinder searching with other internal systems and software applications. Coupling SciFinder more tightly with other data systems will improve researchers’ efficiency by providing fast and easy access to a critical source of information that researchers use on a daily basis at every stage of the R&D process.

Uber vs Taxi companies, Tesla vs car dealer, Square vs credit card companies, Airbnb vs hotels. These are examples of the new kind of companies, who are trying to disrupt their industries. And they are not using their research, their technology or their patented know-how. They are using the internet technology and rethinking the traditional business models. The growth here is much faster than the market. The question that will get raised in this talk is: - what can we learn from them and what are the implications for the players in the patent industry?

App Stores from Apple and Google created a new industry: the app industry. It seems en vogue to have an app for almost everything. In the past, we've seen at ICIC already some examples of apps for chemistry or mobile chemistry. The growing computer power and the context awareness in our pockets are eventually changing our behavior. If not in our generation, then in the next generation. This round table discussion is about the status quo, the actual adoption rate and the future of patent search apps.

Assessment of the “Mode of Action Landscape” for particular disease areas is of high interest for pharmaceutical companies. To enable identification of upcoming, established and vanishing modes of action over time and clinical phases it is crucial to have tools for integration and comparison of drug pipeline data from various sources, including informative visualizations of changes in the landscape.

The BizInt Smart Charts product family including VantagePoint - Smart Charts Edition (VP-SCE) enables these analyses and was therefore selected for evaluation. Data was integrated from different key drug pipeline databases, and the newly developed VP-SCE provided opportunities to use in-house data for normalization of important field content such as the highly diverse lists of “Mode of Action” generated by the pipeline databases. Using an example of pipeline data in the field of breast cancer we will show how the data was curated and processed to reach the final landscape, and how the programs can be applied in the most effective way. Examples of visualizations for facilitated decision-making will also be shown. To this end, our presentation will provide insight on the value of integrating and visualizing both external and internal data from drug pipelines employing these tools.

Due to their complexity and technical variances, patents are some of the most difficult documents to translate, whether translated by machines or humans. Language Studio™ is leveraged by several leading patent providers to translate in excess of 2 billion words of patent content every day, in 20 different domains and writing styles, from languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German and others. Extensive research and experimentation has been applied over the last 8 years to develop unique approaches to patent translation processing. These include the automated detection of IPC class groupings and document sections such as Title, Claim, Abstract and Description – each of which has their own writing style and domain preferences. This presentation will explore the complexities of patent translation and present some novel approaches to addressing the challenges of this unique domain.

This presentation considers the explosion in the Asian documentation (with key facts and figures) and the challenges that this generates in the IP World. It also details how the EPO is proactively adapting to keep ahead of these challenges. The main areas of focus are:

• identifying the major areas for investigation
• acquiring the various types of Asian documentation
• developing state of the art tools to efficiently search in the Asian documentation
• work done on various translation possibilities • accessing the work done by the various patent offices
• training examiners and keeping their knowledge bang up to date

It culminates with facts and figures which show how the EPO has progressed in bringing the Asian documentation into the daily search and examination work of examiners.

The innovative multinational pharmaceutical industry is highly dependent on the release and promotion of new drugs. However, recent economic evidence demonstrates a continuing decrease in new drugs’ market approval. Moreover, the industry is challenged by the “patent cliff”, where many blockbuster drugs are losing patent protection and facing ferocious competition.

It seems that the shortage of new drugs points to an intensification of drug development based on molecules already known, leading to incremental patents. However, there is a suspicion that many incremental patents are actually trivial, because they add little or nothing to existing therapies, but still impose high drug costs. To analyze that hypothesis, the present study has drawn the profile of all patents filed in Brazil in the antiretroviral (ARV) field up to 2012. Using VantagePoint® and Questel Orbit® softwares, a patent matrix was constructed with quali-quantitative data. Next, the patent applications' claims were analysed in order to detect incremental patents and classified according to their incrementalities. Finally we looked for evidence of triviality. As a result, it was demonstrated that the ARV market is highly concentrated and patent applications basically belong to six countries. Evidence that many incrementalities are actually trivialities and act as entry barriers, was found. Patent landscape studies such as this one can be extrapolated to other areas or countries, and can be used as a tool for public policy’s analysis to really fuel technological advance.

Understanding competitors’ patent portfolios and protecting their own intellectual properties are key questions for pharmaceutical companies. Extracting and analyzing the chemical space covered by these patents is an extremely complex and time consuming challenge and requires many communication rounds between IP experts and members of drug discovery teams. ChemAxon has been working with researchers in the industry to develop tools to help in this area by building and analyzing project specific databases based on high quality computer-assisted extraction of chemical information from patent documents. These databases can be useful across the full drug discovery process from idea generation to lead candidate selection, drug design and creation of new patents. This way we can eliminate these rounds of communication, because IP experts can precisely translate the content of patent documents to the language of chemistry which is more comprehensible to other actors. This presentation will discuss the results of this development and technologies developed or used, namely: English and Chinese Name to Structure, which dramatically speeds up the extraction process; Markush Editor that helps draw complex Markush structures more easily, Structure Checker and Markush Validation, which confirm the quality of extracted information. We will also introduce our search, enumeration and hit visualization and our latest improvements that allow overlap analysis between Markush structures.