Towards a Patent landscaping of Regenerative Medicine

Regenerative medicine (RM) takes an increasingly important place in medical research. However, it is a heterogeneous research domain bringing together different scientific fields. The aim of this study is to characterize the patent landscape of this new research field, and its current trend using a patinformatics approach. We analyze the information embedded in patent database using text-mining techniques, data visualization and network analysis. In a landscape, one can observe trends of different technologies, rankings of actors, disposition of technology in geographical areas, collaborative patterns. Patenting in RM overlaps mainly with tissue engineering, stem cell, and biomaterials fields. These research fields are autonomous with small overlap between each other. Emerging trends such as bioprinting, induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSc), tissue scaffolding, tissue regeneration and wound healing could be identified. Around 14000 family patents have been filed worldwide. Patents protection appeared sporadically in the early 1980s with biomaterial or wound healing patents filing. With the development of iPSc research in 2000-2005, the patent filing rate accelerated significantly. It is supported by new emerging invention trends ranging form a handful of patents to thousands of them. Ranking of applicants by country of patent filing show the supremacy of US and to a less extend China. If firms are present as patent assignee, the field is dominated by academic ownership of the inventions. The top leading applicant is the National Institute of Health (NIH, USA), and depending on the research subfields, we might be able to identify big pharma, biotech companies, Japanese or Korean universities or national public research organizations (CNRS or INSERM). Whatever the country origin of the applicants, they share a worldwide IP protection strategy with patent publications in North and South America, Europe, China, India and Australia. Finally, network analysis shows different pattern of collaborations according to the research subfields. While small world pattern of collaboration without danger of monopoly are identified for some emerging trends, one can observe network of collaboration centralized around public institution (mainly the NIH) of private institution (such as big pharma) for other emerging concepts. This patent map with the help of data visualization tools will improve the overall transparency of regenerative medicine to researchers, policy-markers and the civil society extending previous work on the scientific landscape of RM.