Each year, pharmaceuticals, biotech organizations, academic institutions and law firms commit costly errors that happen due to poorly informed IP portfolio decisions. Relating to biological sequence search, here are nine serious mistakes we hate to see life science companies make.
Everyone likes free biological sequence search. A free IP sequence search usually involves the following steps: search the Genbank patent divisions on the NCBI BLAST web site, go through the alignments one by one, and lookup related patent information on the web. Bad idea. Here are four reasons why.
NCBI BLAST is the most popular sequence comparison algorithm, but it was not built with intellectual property sequence search in mind. Here we discuss three problems with using NCBI BLAST alone for such sequence alignments.