"Biotech/Pharma Top 50 (plus 6)"
By Donald Zuhn --
The Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) released its 28th annual list of the top 300 organizations receiving U.S. patents. Patent Docs Readers may recall that the U.S. Patent and 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 2010 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 207,915 patents were issued in 2010, which was an increase from the 165,213 patents that issued in 2009. The top fifteen companies on the IPO Top 300 are listed below
As in past years, Patent Docs 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 2010. This year's list of 56 biotech and pharma companies and organizations continues to reverse a downward trend that saw the number of biotech and pharma companies and organizations drop from 51 in 2006 to 47 in 2007 to 43 in 2008 before rising to 47 last year. Each organization's IPO top 300 ranking for 2010 is indicated in the "'10 IPO Rank" column; the IPO top 300 ranking for 2009 (if available) is indicated in the "'09 IPO Rank" column. Biotech and pharma companies and organizations that failed to make the IPO top 300 in 2010 after making it in 2009 included Cardiac Pacemakers, Inc. (#121 on the IPO top 300 for 2009), Battelle Memorial Institute (157), Zymogenetics, Inc. (242), and Eli Lilly and Co. (258).
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 2009," May 26, 2010
• "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
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