SynBERC:MIT/Calendar/2007-9-26

Visit the wiki version of this page.

Anyone in the synthetic biology community is welcome to attend.

Wednesday September 26, 2007 at 12:00pm EST

32-D463, MIT

Topic of discussion
Paul Oldham from Lancaster University - Synthetic Biology: Interrogating the Patent Landscape


 * European Patent Office - Scenarios for the Future - download the pdf
 * International patent classification scheme (there is also a U.S. patent classification scheme) - this can help in searching the patent literature
 * There is no classification code for genomics, proteomics, or synthetic biology.
 * The Thomson Corporation are the main player in the commercial software for full-text patent searching.
 * Google is doing a pretty good job of enabling search of the U.S. patent database. But they haven't yet released anything for European patents.  -TK
 * Searches of the patent literature requires a lot of cleaning. "Synthetic cell" can yield results on underwear for example.
 * Thomson's Micropatent Aureka Gold service allows construction of "patent landscapes". It clusters based of frequency of appearance of a set of stock terms.
 * What are the terms that define synthetic biology?
 * Patent citation searching; Top cited patents are cited heavily because either the invention is very novel or because the claims are very broad. This might be a useful way of searching the patent literature.
 * Some companies have enormous numbers of patents - they can drown out companies with small numbers of patents that may be of interest.
 * Patents are a trailing indicator ... they tend to come 3 years later. What are the leading indicators - information on the web or publications?  Perhaps patent applications?


 * 1) How do I find patents I care about? - Jason
 * 2) *getting the right set of search terms is really hard ... pretty easy to go too narrow or too broad
 * 3) Institute a broad search, then send those to a committee that decides whether that patent is synthetic biology or not (distributed network of folks) and classifies it. - TK
 * 4) Then you have to decide how to respond to overly broad patents. - Ken
 * 5) Then patent trolls have incentive to avoid getting flagged in the search process. - Ken
 * 6) *You can partially find these folks by looking at conference attendee lists etc.
 * 7) What would patent trolls go after?


 * Just because a patent exists, doesn't mean that it is valid or enforceable.
 * It would be nice to search patented protein and DNA sequences. - Melina
 * All patented sequences are in Genbank but there may not be a way to limit your search to patented sequences. - TK

Future events
Nuts and bolts of patent searching
 * Friday 11-1pm
 * E38 - 2nd floor conference room (above the MIT bookstore)
 * aca AT mit DOT edu

Monday at 4pm at Science Center at Harvard
 * A second round table discussion