Medical Patent Power
Korea is becoming a strong patent country for medicine and medical supplies.
The number of patent applications for medicine and medical supplies is decreasing in many countries including the U.S. and Japan, but increasing in Korea. The main reasons are that pharmacists are getting more interested in intellectual property rights and also a lot of research has been done in Korea over the past few years.
According to the analysis of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) international application trends in health and medical fields from the Korea Health Industry Development Institute on August 28, there were 19,631 PCT applications in the health and medical fields, which is 10.3 percent of the total.
As the basic rule of patents is one patent per country, patent applicants must register in the country from which they desire to obtain patent rights, so that they can be guaranteed exclusive patent rights. But since an international PCT application achieves the same effect of directly applying in many countries, applicants do not need to file in every single country, but receive benefits in commissions when going through the patent processes in Korea. So the number of international PCT applications filed in Korea is increasing every year.
The number of PCT applications in medicine and medical supplies dropped by 1.3 percent to 7,711 cases this year, compared to last year, and on average 2.1 percent per year for the last five years. Medicine and medical supplies have been in fifth place, in terms of occupancy, since 2009, but descended to seventh place last year.
In 2013, PCT applications of the top ten countries in medicine and medical supplies accounted for 78.2 percent of the total. The U.S. was highest at 40.2 percent, followed by Japan with 7.6 percent, Germany at 5.8 percent, Korea at 5.6 percent, and China at 5.3 percent. For the last five years, companies and universities in the U.S. and Switzerland such as Novartis, Mondobiotec, and Merck have been the major patent applicants in medicine and medical supplies.
Most countries showed downward trends in the number of PCT applications per year. However, both the number of applications and occupancy ratio in Korea and China increased. Korea especially scored the highest growth of 2.5 percent out of the top ten countries in 2013, when the total number of patent applications decreased.
In 2013, the number of PCT applications in medical technologies increased 4.8 percent to 11,920, and the average annual growth rate was maintained at 3.3 percent. In the medical technology area, the top countries were the U.S. with 41.7 percent, Japan with 16.4 percent, Germany with 7.4 percent, the Netherlands with 4.1 percent, and Korea with 4.0 percent. While the growth in the number of patent applications is stagnating in the U.S., Japan has almost doubled the number of patent applications over the last five years. Among the top ten applicant companies in the medical technology field, three of the U.S. companies – Phillips, Medtronic and Boston Scientific – were ranked highest among them, just as in the medicine and medical supplies field.