"Biotech/Pharma"
Top 47"

    By
Donald Zuhn —

The
Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) released its 27th annual list of
the top 300 organizations receiving U.S. patents.  Patent Docs
Readers may recall that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office stopped
releasing its annual list of top patent recipients in 2006 in order to
"discourag[e] any perception that we believe more is better."

The
IPO stated that while it does not intend for the report to "encourage or
discourage patenting," it would continue to publish its annual list of top
recipients because "the number of patents granted is one of the few
objective measures of the patent system as a whole and the patenting activities
of individual industries and companies."  The IPO compiled its list by counting the number of utility
patents granted during 2009 on which an organization or its subsidiary was
listed as the owner on the face of the patent.  However, the IPO attributed patents that were granted to two
or more organizations jointly to the organization listed first on the
patent.  The IPO noted that 165,213
patents were issued in 2009, which was an increase from the 154,699 patents
that issued in 2008.  The top
fifteen companies on the IPO Top 300 are listed below

As
in past years, we used the IPO's list of top patent holders to compile a list
of the top "biotech and pharma" companies and organizations receiving
U.S. patents in 2009.  This year's
list of 47 biotech and pharma companies and organizations reverses a downward
trend that saw the number of biotech and pharma companies and organizations go
from 51 in 2006 to 47 in 2007 to 43 last year.  Each organization's IPO top 300 ranking for 2009 is
indicated in the "'09 IPO Rank" column; the IPO top 300 ranking for
2008 (if available) is indicated in the "'08 IPO Rank" column.  Please note that some of the companies
and organizations listed below may be involved in non-biotech or non-pharma
work, and therefore, a portion of the patents granted to these companies and
organizations may be directed to other than biotech and pharma-related
inventions.  In addition, our list
is a little inclusive in that we included medical device companies.

For
additional information regarding this topic, please see:

•
"IPO Releases List of Top 300 Patent Holders for 2008," May 14, 2009
• "IPO
Releases List of Top 300 Patent Holders," May 22, 2008
• "IPO
Posts List of Top 300 Patent Holders," April 20, 2007