Strategic mining of cyanobacterial patents from the USPTO patent database and analysis of their scope and implications

Patent analysis with the help of the strategic mining of patents from databases is important and useful within the framework of application-oriented research and its commercialization. In the analysis reported here, we have mined cyanobacterial patents from the patent database of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In order to make an assessment of the commercial potentials of cyanobacteria, we conducted the patent search (from 1976 to April 2006) using certain generic terms and the 84 genera of cyanobacteria as keywords. The search was performed in two major ways - searching the abstracts and claims of the patents cumulatively and searching the entire patent documents by the mode of 'all fields' in USPTO. In the abstract- and claims-based search, 234 patents were obtained after the removal of overlapping patents among the keywords. An additional 31 patents were added following the 'all fields' search; these patents were not covered in the search that was based on abstracts and claims. The entire package of 265 patents, of which 244 were related to cyanobacteria, was then analyzed. Information derived from these patents identified five major areas of cyanobacterial utilization. Cyanobacteria have been patented as a source of a wide spectrum of products, for medical, agriculture and environmental applications, for gene-based products, for methods of cultivation and for methods of control. The chronological development in granting cyanobacterial patents was also traced. This study demonstrates that such strategic mining and analysis of patent data can be used as an index for future development.