A crucial benchmark to track for the cord blood market is the number and type of cord blood related patents that have been issued.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has a patent analysis tool that offers a “Full Text and Image Database Search.” The database includes information about all American patents, from the first patent issued in 1790 to the most recent issue week.1 The text of patents issued from January 1976 to the present is fully searchable, including bibliographic data, such as the inventor’s name, the patent’s title, and the assignee’s name; the abstract; the full description of the invention; and the claims.2
Users can utilize the USPTO patent analysis tool to screen for specific keywords within patents, allowing for assessment of the frequency of patents containing those specific keywords. This patent tool was used to assess frequency of the phrase “Cord Blood” within U.S. patents, by year.
For purposes of keeping this analysis specific to the cord blood market, the term “Cord Blood” was screened for its presence within the Title of U.S. patents. The Title was chosen as the area of the patent to search, because it is a highly-specific phrase that captures the focus of the patent.
This search determines that there are 30 patents that have the term “Cord Blood” appearing within the Title of the patent.3
A complete list of these patents is shown below.
TABLE. PATENTS CONTAINING THE WORD “CORD BLOOD” IN THE TITLE (USPTO.GOV)
The table below presents a categorical breakdown of U.S. patents with “Cord Blood” in the title. It identifies that the most common type of cord blood patent pertains to “Cord Blood Stem Cells,” followed by patents pertaining to “Cord Blood Collection.”
See the table and chart below for additional detail.
TABLE. CATEGORICAL BREAKDOWN OF U.S. PATENTS WITH “CORD BLOOD” IN TITLE
To learn more about the cord blood banking industry, view the “Complete 2017-18 Global Cord Blood Banking Industry Report.“
1 Patft.uspto.gov, (2017). patft » Page 1 of 1. [online] Available at: http://patft.uspto.gov/. [Accessed 6 Nov. 2016].
2 Ibid.
3 Patft.uspto.gov, (2017). Patent Database Search Results: TTL/”Cord Blood” in US Patent Collection. [online] Available at: http://www.uspto.gov/patents/\process/search/#heading-1. [Accessed 6 Nov. 2016].