About a week ago, the FTC filed a suit against Endo Pharmaceuticals (among others) for blocking generic competition of its Opana ER and Lidoderm products. It is alleging that in addition to paying to delay competitive products, Endo used a no-AG commitment that gave Watson Laboratories more than 7 months of their own monopoly on…
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: there’s a reason why we are the market leader in patent sequence search. It has surprisingly little to do with our user-friendly search interface, our stellar customer support, or our good looks. While (at least some of) these things certainly help, it is the content…
After 15 years in this field and writing about this many times, I’m still shocked when I see professional IP people that use BLAST for their sequence searches. BLAST is a crude and unreliable way to align sequences, and under normal circumstances it shouldn’t be used for anything patent related. There, I said it. Sequences…
Those of you who have read my previous blog post 10 Reasons Why Research Scientists Should Patent Search know that I use patents to find information about my research topics. One of the most valuable resources I had when I first started researching patents was a lengthy (and rather technical) introduction to the way they…
Where does your team find inspiration for new ideas, projects, and opportunities? Journals, publications, conferences, and other research are common answers, but if that’s where your sources end, you’re missing one incredibly productive source – patents.
It’s hard not to notice that the future is arriving faster than ever. Innovations are arriving at breakneck speed. In just the last couple of years we have seen things like self-driving cars, software that beats Jeopardy!, bipedal robots that can navigate difficult terrain just like humans do, and a very convincing defeat of one…
When a search for something (digital or tangible) is started, often, one of the first tactics employed is to narrow down the scope to increase the chances of success, or at least speed up the process. Why search upstairs if you know your car keys are probably somewhere in the kitchen?
Over the last decade we have succeeded in making GenomeQuest the industry standard for biological sequence searching in IP. We did this through the combination of specialized IP search algorithms and what has become the world’s largest IP sequence database (let alone the largest sequence database on earth) through a combination of automation and manual…
What to Look for in US public PAIR Like most people that work with patents, I have always understood that USPTO’s Patent Application Information Retrieval (public PAIR) is the USPTO’s way of sharing information on where a patent application is in its lifecycle. It is a critically important resource because it provides the most up-to-date…
Like any molecular biologist that has worked in pharma research, I have searched through and read a lot of scientific literature. I like to think that I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’m always surprised though, when I run into colleagues who don’t spend much time searching patents on a regular basis. I understand that…