What can Ambercite tell us about the milestone US patent 11,000,000?
June 10 2021 The rate of patent filings seems to be increasing all the time, and the USPTO has just published US11,000,000, covering Repositioning wires and methods for repositioning prosthetic heart valve devices within a heart chamber and related systems, devices and methods. This patent has a priority date of September 2018.
The abstract reads:
The invention provides methods, devices and systems for delivering, positioning and/or repositioning an expandable prosthetic heart valve in a patient's heart chamber. At least one non-looped wire and looped wire pair is operatively connected with an expanded prosthetic heart valve that is collapsed within a delivery catheter lumen having its distal end positioned in the subject heart chamber. The collapsed prosthetic heart valve is translated through the delivery catheter lumen to and out of its distal end where the prosthetic heart valve expands to a working configuration. The wire(s) of the non-looped and looped wire pair may be manipulated by pulling proximately or pushing distally to position or reposition the expanded prosthetic stent into position, then released from connection with the positioned stent and withdrawn from the patient.
This looks like a useful invention, but as is so often the case, an Ambercite search based on this patent information can provide some context for this patent. So what can we learn about this patent from an Ambercite search?
1) What is the most similar patent to US11,000,000?
According to Ambercite, the most similar patent is US10441420, filed in 2016 for Devices and methods for transcatheter valve loading and implantation. This patent is similar in concept and ambition, and not surprisingly was cited by the US examiner in the search process.
To find this patent, we added the US11,000,000 source patent into Ambercite using the default settings:
And the Ambercite patent ended up at the top of the list, with a Similarity Score of 3 (using the proprietary Ambercite scoring system)
This patent also discloses the delivery of a heart valve via a catheter.
2) What is most similar ‘unknown’ patent?
The most similar but uncited prior art patent, hence being an ‘unknown’ citation, was US7381219, filed in 2003 for a Low profile heart valve and delivery system.
Despite being similar in concept, this patent has not been cited by either the patent applicant or examiner.
3) We found many other similar but uncited prior art documents
When we set the Ambercite query to return the most similar 2000 patents, we found 1594 potentially similar patents, of which 1590 had not been previously cited.
1590 patents is a lot to consider, so to make them easier to review we filtered these results to limit them to patents that referred to both delivery and valve in the title or abstract, as shown in the filter settings below (which we applied to the Title/Abstract field):
This filter returned 131 patents, and of these 131 patents, 16 also referred to heart and wires, for example US9629718B2, which covers a Valve delivery tool. So there are plenty of similar patents out there, but of course these would need to be reviewed in detail to determine if they invalidate US11,000,000.
4) Licensing Potential for US11,000,000
We can also run a Licensing potential search for US11,000,000, using the settings below:
We can export the results into an Excel spreadsheet, and from that, work out the Total Licensing Potential for other companies in this space. The top five companies we found are shown below:
Now this does not mean that the owner of US11,000,000, the US-based 4C Medical Technologies can automatically seek a license from the above-listed companies - but it does suggest that there is enough apparent similarity between patents owned by these companies, and 4C Technologies, for there to be the potential for a license.
Summary - Ambercite can provide a broader perspective on a patent
This simple but helpful case study shows how Ambercite can provide an insightful and rounded perspective of a recent patent. We now understand how similar some of the patents in this area are, both cited and uncited patents, and the potential licensing prospects for this patent.