AmberBlog

Invention never happens in a vacuum, and instead tends to build on earlier work done by either the inventor or other inventors. It is possible to track this 'knowledge flow' by looking at patent citations, which may be among the most reliable sources of innovation related data. While some other patent analysis techniques also analyse patent citations, NPA adds two improvements to this process:

• Only citations between patents in the study of interest are considered. Some broad patents have disclosures that may be relevant to a number of different fields. However, NPA is focused on finding the strongest patents within a specific field of interest, and so only takes relevant patent citations into account.
• In any case, patent citations are not treated equally. NPA has a process for weighting patent citations, and these weighted patent citations are used when assessing the relative importance of patents.

There are many other potential applications for knowledge flow analysis, including patent litigation. In the recently released report Clearing the fog: Patenting trends for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, we have investigated which patents have had the strongest influence on other patents in this field. Clearing the fog identifed 23 clusters of patenting activity, which in turn formed into two groupings of clusters, which we names the Amyloid Grouping and Tau Grouping in relation to the proteins these patents were targeting. The top three foundation patents, or most influential, in each grouping of clusters is shown in the Table.

This table shows some interesting results. The most influential patent in the Amyloid Grouping, the now expired US4666829 filed by the University of California, discloses the Alzheimer's Amyloid Polypeptide (AAP) which is the precursor of beta amyloid, and had 94 forward citations in the dataset. The next most influential patent was the number one ranked NPA patent of all.

In the Tau Grouping, the two most influential patents, US7265148 and US7332521, were both invented by Baihua Hu, a principle scientist at Pfizer, and refer to substituted pyrrole-indoles.

It should be noted that this type of analysis should not be confused with the general NPA patent ranking process, which also takes into account other measures of patent 'popularity'. Nonetheless analysis of foundation patents can help provide a unique perspective on the history of a technology, and its key influences and influencers.

(This blog post was based on material previously presented in the Clearing the fog report: used with permission)

Ambercite is very proud to be associated with the latest Griffith Hack NPA white paper Clearing the fog: Patenting trends for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, which was released today. In this white paper Griffith Hack, working very closely with and applying the Network Patent Analysis (NPA) process developed by Ambercite, analyses over 48,000 patents to fiilter, cluster and rank these patents. Two separate NPA maps accompany the white paper, one NPA map showing an cluster focused patent landscape map, and one NPA map showing a time scale patent landscape map.

Clearing the fog is also the best publically available demonstration yet of the powerful ability of NPA to precisely cluster patents with a precision unavailable with keyword or IPC patent code clustering. While we have seen this precise clustering for the majority of the confidential NPA client studies we have delivered, this degree of clustering is stronger than in our previous two NPA white papers on hybrid car and smartphone patents.

Clearing the fog also also demonstrates several other features of NPA:

• the power of associative searching (page 5)
• the value of a NPA time scale map (page 15, and available as a separate download)
• the concept of foundation patents (page 16)
• the ability of NPA to identify what could important future patents (page 17)
• and even some natural limitations of NPA (page 21)

As well as a detailed discussion of the leading patents, patent owners and inventors in the area of Alzheimer's disease, an increasing important disease which may impact many of our elderly and the people that care for them.

Interested in learning more, or how NPA can be applied into your business? Come back to us, and we can share more about the NPA process and deliverables.