The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced the introduction of transitional measures to encourage applicants towards an early uptake of the Unitary Patent effect. Details can be found here, but to make it slightly more accessible, we have put together a short summary for you.
The interrelated measures in question will be made available once the following requirements are met:
A so called “request for a delay in issuing the grant” may be filed if a 71(3) communication has been received but approval of the text has not yet taken place. Note that “a request for delay filed on the same day as the approval of the text intended for grant will be considered to have been validly filed”.
Such a request will allow the EPO to “register unitary effect immediately at the start of the system”, provided the above requirements are met.
If either of these options are of interest to you and/or you would like to find out more, please do get in touch with your usual contact at Mathys & Squire or email us at [email protected].
The world’s attention remains, rightfully, focused on the goal of innovating its way to carbon neutrality – the pledges of the recent COP26 summit are just the most recent in decades of reforms. Accordingly, the past 20 years have seen dramatic changes in the patent landscape of clean technology.
Since 2017, there has been an average of 3.3% annual growth in low-carbon energy patents, rising faster than all other technology areas. Despite this, a 2020 IEA report concluded that the energy sector will only reach net-zero emissions if there is a significant and concerted global push to accelerate innovation. From a life sciences and chemistry perspective, some trends to keep an eye on in 2022 are: advancements in battery technology; sustained progress in hydrogen development; solar photovoltaic (PV) cells; and progress in recycling technology.
The compact but accessible chemical energy storage of fossil fuels is the property that has underpinned their dominance in the energy landscape over the past century. However, with the global shift towards renewables, providing effective ways of storing electrical energy is becoming increasingly important. As such, battery technology has been one of the frontrunners in patent activity growth during the past two decades. Between 2000-2018, the annual number of international patent families (IPFs) in all technologies increased by 213%, compared to a 704% rise in electricity storage related IPFs. Of this, 9/10 patents related to battery technologies.
Even with this remarkable growth in the sector, in recent years there have been additional efforts to encourage further development, the results of which we expect to start noticing in the next year or two. Notably, the BATT4EU partnership (between the European Commission and the BEPA) was announced in June 2021, aiming to boost European battery research and innovation with a budget of €925 million. The UK also continues to dedicate resources to this area – in March 2021, the government-backed Faraday Institution committed to a £22.6 million programme that aims to develop battery safety, including its reliability and sustainability, across a number of fields.
Li-ion batteries have emerged as the dominant system around which innovation is largely focused, accounting for 45% of patenting activity relating to battery cells in 2018. However, as their development matures (with an increasing proportion of IPFs being related to manufacturing or engineering), space is being created for emerging technologies. For instance, patenting activity in solid-state batteries, where solid electrolytes are used, has been increasing by an average of 25% annually since 2010 and we expect this trend to continue in 2022. The exploration of new electrode materials is also an area of steady growth, with plenty of potential for discoveries to supplant existing compositions – lithium cobalt oxide was the prevailing cathode material in 2005, which was then overtaken by lithium nickel cobalt manganese oxide by 2011, with lithium nickel cobalt aluminium now showing great promise. Clearly, there is still room for considerable progress in battery technology.
Following the most significant surge in global activity in hydrogen-related technologies in the early 2000s, where the number of IPFs grew from 517 in 2000 to over 2,000 by 2008, patenting activity has sustained an upward trend, albeit showing slower growth than, for example, battery technology.
A significant roadblock in the wider utilisation of hydrogen is the slower growth of the end market for its applications, when compared to other clean energy sources such as solar or wind. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that wider incentivisation and adoption of hydrogen is needed, with many countries recently announcing national hydrogen strategies – for instance, the UK Hydrogen Strategy of August 2021 (including a £240m ‘Net Zero Hydrogen Fund’), Germany’s H2 Global programme (June 2021), and the wider framework of the EU’s Hydrogen Strategy (July 2020).
Consequently, it seems likely that the growing investment in the hydrogen sector will lead not only to the scaling-up of existing technologies, but the accelerated development of new and emerging ones; anion exchange membrane systems show great promise in improving the efficiency of traditional alkaline cells and overcoming the platinum requirements of proton exchange systems, while solid-oxide electrolyser cells with ceramic electrolytes can utilise steam at impressive conversion efficiencies. The increasing focus on hydrogen in cleantech is reflected in the awarding of the ‘Fix Our Climate’ Earthshot Prize to Enapter – leading developers of AEM electrolyser technology – in late 2021.
Global solar PV generation increased by 156 TWh (23%) in 2020 to reach 821 TWh, representing the second-highest absolute generation growth of all renewables. This is due in no small part to the relatively early market consolidation of inorganic photovoltaic cell technology, and the associated fall in prices over the following years.
Despite these advances, significant progress still needs to be made to hit the numerous national and global targets for renewable energy. For example, to reach the EU’s goal of achieving 40% renewables by 2030, it is estimated that solar capacity would need to increase from 137 GW (as of 2020) to around 660 GW. Fulfilling that requirement may involve, or even necessitate, further innovation in solar PV cell technology.
Such developments are potentially already in the pipeline: since 2010 there has been a steady rise in IPFs concerning organic PV cells, overtaking the number of other PV cell patents in 2015. Compared to the prevailing silicon-based inorganic PV cells, those that utilise light-absorbing organic small molecules/polymers have the potential to provide a much cheaper, more environmentally friendly and customisable alternative that could be produced on a massive scale. We expect to see more of this technology emerging in the coming year.
Waste has long been an inevitable consequence of the economic and manufacturing processes that have become fundamental to most elements of modern life. However, the benefits of recovering waste materials are becoming harder to ignore; in addition to reducing emissions from extensive mining operations, slowing the depletion of natural resources and limiting ecotoxicity, it can alleviate costly fluctuations in price and/or supply of key materials. As examples of this approach, alternative materials and recyclable plastics have been in the spotlight for a while and are still an important focus for development, but progress in other areas has often been slower.
For instance, the ever-increasing demand for Li-ion batteries, with the progress of electrification, has been in stark contrast to recycling activity once they reach end-of-life stages: in 2019, the recycling rate for Li-ion batteries in the US was less than 5%. Considering the estimation that the electric cars sold in 2019 alone would result in 500,000 tonnes of battery pack waste, it’s clear that considerable improvement is needed. There is therefore plenty of room for innovation in the coming years for scalable, efficient and clean battery recycling processes.
As mentioned earlier, plastics are another major focus of recycling technology. Quite often this means developing processes to enable effective separation and reuse of existing plastics, but the design of new polymers focused on inherent recyclability is an area of growing activity – IPFs in the field doubled between 2015 and 2019. Within this category are several promising avenues for further development, including vitrimers, which consist of a specific type of dynamic polymer network able to change its topology without fluctuations in overall connectivity.
More generally across areas related to recycling, patent filing activity has maintained its upward trend in recent years. With initiatives such as the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan, adopted in March 2020, it seems likely that patenting activity in recycling technologies will continue to grow solidly in the years to come.
Personalised medicine has been a strong focus of pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) in recent years, and we expect this to continue in 2022 and beyond, with the global personalised medicine market forecasted to grow to $717 billion by 2025. Personalised medicine encompasses technologies enabling cancer prognosis, as well as specific treatments targeting certain cancers associated with specific gene mutation. It also facilitates preventative medicine, allowing the identification of patients with a genetic predisposition for a particular disease to enable pre-emptive treatment.
Personalised medicines cover a wide range of actives, from more traditional small molecules to advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs) such as stem cells and CAR-T cells. ATMPs are also a hot trend, with these products expected to increase markedly from the current level of around a third of pharmaceutical pipelines over the next decade. In view of the complexity of ATMPs compared with traditional pharmaceuticals, the IP landscape around ATMPs is also more complex, which may give rise to an increase in collaborations as companies work to get these products developed, approved and on the market. There is also the potential for an increased number of contentious proceedings, as companies struggle to find freedom to operate in a complex and crowded IP market.
The climate crisis and global food crisis are likely to drive the use of biotech to look for alternatives to conventional agricultural products and methods. Increased awareness of the problems caused by chemical pesticides is stimulating research into, and take up of, alternatives which reduce pesticide use and runoff, leading to an increased focus on biopesticides, with the global market projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.7% through to at least 2025. Whilst the public has historically been wary of genetically modified crops, genetically modified organisms have the potential to provide significant advances in sustainable agriculture, by improving crop yield and resilience, as well as through engineering crops with increased nutritional value or other desirable properties. As well as innovation to support a sustainable future, biotech can also be used to create crops that can actively remove existing pollutants through a process called phytoremediation. The growth in artificial meat was a significant trend in 2021, and the appetite (excuse the pun!) for such products shows no sign of slowing down.
Deep tech in general is seen as a massive growth opportunity (as covered in another of our IP trends articles), and it is estimated that deep tech investments will grow to about $140 billion by 2025. Specifically, in the context of biotech, artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology are particular focuses. Synthetic biology is particularly exciting, as it has potential applications in multiple sectors, including cell engineering, biofabrication and drug discovery. The use of AI and machine learning based on large datasets can help accelerate early drug development, facilitating accurate prediction of drug-human interactions and reducing reliance on human trials at every development stage.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented effort to accelerate drug discovery, testing and approval. Whereas in the past it would typically take up to 10 years for a new drug to be approved, the COVID-19 vaccines were developed and approved in under a year. These changes in approach will have knock-on benefits for drug development and approval far beyond COVID-19. Machine learning, AI and big data can further accelerate the drug development pathway. This technical acceleration will require commercial strategies to adapt. For example, funding for human trials may be required sooner if the early development and testing phases are completed more quickly, increasing pressure for smaller companies to find partners or investors to help bear the costs. There is also likely to be an effect on pipelines and on IP as nonviable projects may be identified and dropped sooner, leading to more focused R&D and a tighter IP estate.
After years in the making, it is expected that the new Unitary Patent system and associated Unified Patent Court (a pan-European form of protection and associated court) will come into force in late 2022. All innovators, regardless of their technical focus, will need to evaluate their patent strategies in light of the new system. Some European countries are not part of this system (including the UK, Spain and Switzerland), and so there are also factors to consider regarding the participating/non-participating countries. There are potential pros and cons to opting newly granted patents into this unitary system, which patentees will need to consider on a case-by-case basis to ensure the right decision is made for each of their patents.
Data provided by Mathys & Squire has featured in an article by City A.M. highlighting a surge in trade mark applications following Brexit, which has in turn increased the wait time for trade mark application approval. Click here to read the article in City A.M.
An extended version of the release is available below, and has been published by World Trademark Review, GB News, Irish Legal News, Scottish Legal News, Institute of Export & International Trade and The Scotsman.
Brexit has triggered a record number of applications for trade marks in the UK, with 195,000 registered in the past year*, up 54% from 127,000 the year before, says leading intellectual property law firm Mathys & Squire.
Since 1 January 2021, the UK is no longer part of the European trade mark regime, meaning that any business looking to trade mark a brand or logo across Europe now has to make a separate application in the UK.
Prior to 1 January 2021, UK trade mark owners could file a single EU trade mark application and secure pan-European protection. Since the end of the Brexit transition period, two separate applications (one for the UK and one for the EU) have been necessary.
The huge surge in trade mark applications since Brexit has forced the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) – the Government agency that handles trade marks, patents and design registrations – to recruit more than 100 new staff to clear the backlog. Waiting times for trade mark applications reached three to four months in the early part of 2021, up from the usual wait of around a couple of weeks.
The IPO has also been inundated by applications from overseas trade mark holders to register with a UK trade mark attorney and address for service in the UK, which is now required post-Brexit.
Mathys & Squire points out that the UK’s departure from the European trade mark regime is permanent, meaning that the sharply increased number of applications represents the ‘new normal’ rather than a spike in activity.
Gary Johnston, Partner and Co-Head of Trade Marks at Mathys & Squire, comments: “The Brexit-fuelled rush to file trade marks and appoint UK attorneys in 2021 has been unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the UK.”
“Businesses from around the world have been forced to spend much more time and money on protecting their intellectual property separately in the UK. UK businesses have had exactly the same problem with their European IP. We’ve been tremendously busy filing applications for UK businesses in Europe too.”
“This huge volume of filings is unlikely to go away. Now we have left the European trade mark regime, this is the level of activity we can expect in the future.”
* Year end 31 October 2021 | Source: IPO
The third article in our ‘IP trends for 2022’ series on innovation and technology focuses on cleantech innovations ranging from electric vehicles (EVs), renewable energy to net-negative emission developments.
During the COP26 summit held in October – November 2021, hundreds of governments, cities and businesses signed a declaration to work towards making all new vehicles release zero emissions by 2040 at the latest. In 2022, we can therefore expect to see a focus on innovation in battery technology, particularly energy storage solutions and fast charging inventions, to make EVs practical and affordable for all consumers. This technological shift is illustrated by the fact that global patent filings for EVs are currently rising, while those for petrol and diesel vehicles are falling rapidly, as we recently reported.
During the climate change conference, there was also a renewed emphasis on the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. With power generation making up a significant proportion of total greenhouse gas emissions, we can expect to see further inventions and innovative developments in renewable energy technologies in 2022, particularly those that reduce the costs of renewable energy implementation to enable developing countries to phase out fossil fuels. For example, we expect to see improvements in the modularisation of onshore and offshore wind turbines, which is key to achieving cost effective wind power by simplifying servicing and upgrades, thus reducing lifecycle costs. We also expect to see developments in the manufacturing of polysilicon for solar photovoltaic cells in 2022, given that shortages of polysilicon in 2021 caused prices of new solar panels to rise for the first time in years.
As well as a spotlight on EV technologies and renewable energy developments, we also expect 2022 to bring innovations in net-negative emission technologies, such as BECCS (biomass energy with carbon capture and storage) – which involves recovering CO2 from the combustion products resulting from burning biomass – and DACCS (direct air carbon capture and storage) – which involves capturing CO2 directly from the air.
The second article in our ‘IP trends for 2022’ series on innovation and technology focuses on blockchain, its patentability and an increasing interest in non-fungible tokens.
Blockchain has been a growing area for a few years now – from both an IP perspective and a commercial perspective. With this, an increasing number of patent applications for blockchain related inventions have been filed around the world. Despite the large number of patent filings in this area, there is still a dearth of blockchain-specific case law and some lack of clarity over exactly what is patentable when it comes to blockchain technology, and to what degree.
As filings progress through the various international patent offices, it is inevitable that specific case law will appear and we might well see some important decisions in the next year. Indeed, as we reported recently, the Australian Patent Office has been one of the first to tackle this technology and has seemingly decided that blockchain is a patentable technology. Moreover, this amenability to blockchain, as we reported here, seems to be shared by a number of other patent offices, and therefore, similar decisions might reasonably be expected elsewhere. If such affirmatory decisions are issued by other offices, we might expect the number of blockchain filings to keep increasing over the coming years.
Patent applications of course go hand in hand with developments in technology and in commercial focus. In this regard, we expect that a particular area of interest in the coming year will be non-fungible tokens, which have moved into the spotlight in the past year.
As part of the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO)’s endeavours to encourage innovation, they have published a survey requesting feedback on the current UK designs system. Launched earlier this week, the survey is particularly aimed at people who do not consider themselves IP experts, and is described by the UKIPO as “an opportunity for designers, design-led businesses, and manufacturers to have their say on the future of how designs are protected in the UK”.
Registered Designs offer effective, quick and cost-efficient IP protection, and we encourage our clients to take part in this survey to ensure any changes to the UK designs system meet your business needs – whether you already have a large portfolio of Registered Designs or have an interest in using Registered Designs in the future.
The survey can be found here. All responses are anonymous, and it should take approximately 10 minutes to complete. The survey closes on 7 February 2022.
We are delighted to see the UK Government dedicating its time and attention to promoting innovation in the UK using IP frameworks. If any clients or contacts have views on any of the questions the survey seeks answers on, we would be happy to hear your thoughts – please get in touch.
The first article in our ‘IP trends for 2022’ series on innovation and technology focuses on ‘Biology 2.0’ and how it is impacted by deep tech and artificial intelligence (AI).
You may have heard of ‘Industry 4.0’ as being the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, relating to the digital transformation of manufacturing, production and related industries, as well as value creation processes. Looking to the year ahead, the term you should become familiar with is ‘Biology 2.0’ –where biology and technology unite in deep tech companies.
As summarised by Eroom’s law (a clear contradiction of Moore’s law), to date advances in biology, such as drug discovery, are becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology – with the costs of bringing a drug to market now amounting to about $2.5 billion and taking over 10 years. Now, 20 years since the human genome project, things finally look set to change. Over recent years we have heard of – and previously reported on – British Research Lab DeepMind’s AI ‘AlphaFold’ programme (owned by Google parent company Alphabet), which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to perform predictions of protein structure. Due to advances in engineering and computer science, and in particular AI, we are now starting to see fundamental changes to the way in which problems in biology are addressed, making use of these advances in AI technologies. This has been referred to by some in the field as ‘Biology 2.0’ – where engineering and computer science principles are applied to biological problems.
Examples of applications where advances are already taking place include:
Companies such as Foundation Medicine develop, manufacture and sell genomic profiling assays based on next-generation sequencing technology for solid tumours, hematologic malignancies and sarcomas, that can be used to match patients to targeted therapies, immunotherapies and clinical trial options. They also partner with the biopharma industry to help discover, develop and distribute the next breakthrough treatments for patients.
The Medicines Discovery Catapult, is testing an in silico (i.e. on a computer) pipeline for identifying new molecules for cancer treatment, for example, applying AI to find new disease ‘drivers’ and candidate drugs for lung cancer. Backed by Innovate UK, it is hoped that this will derisk future research and development projects and also demonstrate new cost and time-saving approaches to drug discovery.
It has been found that neural networks (used in AI) in particular are great at applications that depend on sequential data such as DNA sequence data. Biofacturing companies, such as Zymergen, are exploiting protein structures, such as those produced by DeepMind relating to microbes (e.g. organisms like E. coli), and using them to make products with biology. It is hoped that such data generated by DeepMind can be used for ‘synthetic biology’ – for example, to create microbes that better produce breakthrough chemicals and materials.
Companies such as Brainomix specialise in the creation of AI-powered imaging biomarkers that enable precision medicine for better treatment decisions.
Making use of advanced AI techniques, scientists in the US have developed a tiny camera the size of a coarse grain of salt that takes full-colour images that are as good as ones taken with camera lenses 500,000 times larger in size – which may have real world use, for example in diagnostic imaging (as well as potentially improving the quality of selfies in your smartphone!).
CoMind is working on next-generation non-invasive brain-computer interfaces which will help to develop and improve understanding of the human brain and neurological disorders.
It is clear that there are numerous opportunities to explore within ‘Biology 2.0’ and we are excited to already be working with many innovators in this field. Of course, as with many deep tech companies, those involved in ‘Biology 2.0’ are very IP-rich, however, they often need significant capital investment before they can begin generating revenue. Once a specific milestone is reached and such organisations do start generating revenue, progress can be very significant and. This requires a different model and mindset from investors and those involved in the field, as well as an effective IP strategy to match that can be used to monetise the IP assets.
Mathys & Squire has featured in an article published by City A.M. relating to new data* around global patent applications relating to Covid-19 that have been published since the start of the pandemic. Click here to read the article in City A.M.
An extended version of the article is available below and has also been published by The Patent Lawyer.
The most common type of patent application relates to Covid testing and diagnosis, accounting for 1,668 patents (33% of the total 5,070 applications). 325 patents related to face masks (6%), while just 55 related to sanitizer and 38 to ventilators/respirators.
Mathys & Squire says a key reason why testing is the most common subcategory of Covid patents is the growing acceptance that the virus has become endemic and societies will have to learn to live with it. As a result, Covid testing has become a viable long-term business model.
The law firm says many more Covid patent applications can be expected next year, as it can take up to 18 months for the patent publication process to be completed.
So far, China accounts for the highest proportion of Covid patents by some margin, with 2,652 covid patent applications, 52% of the total number. Indian-registered patents were the second-most common, with 388, and the US was in third place with 383 (7.7% and 7.6%, respectively).
Mathys & Squire say China’s dominance so far is partly due the size and global importance of the country’s manufacturing sector. However, other countries are expected to narrow the gap as patent applications continue to be filed.
Juliet Redhouse, Partner at Mathys & Squire, says: “Covid has sparked an unprecedented wave of innovation in the healthcare sector within a very short timeframe.”
“Pharmaceutical companies and scientific researchers worldwide have done remarkable work in identifying diagnostic and therapeutic solutions to the virus. If businesses are going to continue to invest in R&D in the healthcare sector, they need to be able to protect their intellectual property.”
“We are likely to see even more patent applications as society finds innovative ways to adapt to the presence of the virus. This is likely to include more innovation in testing and treatments.”
*Data covers the period from 01.10.20 to 30.09.21 | Source: World Intellectual Property Office
Our team of patent, trade mark and design attorneys have considered the legal landscape, recent technical developments and inventions, as well as the marketplace, to predict the likely trends that businesses should look out for in the next 12 months.
To kick off our ‘IP trends for 2022’ series, we will be marking National Technology Day (today, 6 January) by looking at emerging trends in the technology space, covering deep tech, blockchain and cleantech. Mathys & Squire is delighted to support researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs in identifying and protecting the intellectual property in their technological inventions. On National Technology Day, it is important to not only spotlight existing innovations that have impacted the world we live in and celebrate their inventors, but also to look to the future and how further developments in technology will shape its course.
Snippet versions of the three articles, written by Partner Andrew White and Associates Dylan Morgan and Oliver Parish, can be found below, with extended versions of each article available throughout January.
Looking to the year ahead, the term you should become familiar with is ‘Biology 2.0’ – where biology and technology unite in deep tech companies. As summarised by Eroom’s law, advances in biology, such as drug discovery, are becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology. Now, 20 years since the human genome project, things finally look set to change.
Due to advances in engineering and computer science, and in particular AI, we are now starting to see fundamental changes to the way in which problems in biology are addressed, making use of these advances in AI technologies. This has been referred to by some in the field as ‘Biology 2.0’ – where engineering and computer science principles are applied to biological problems.
It is clear that there are numerous opportunities to explore within ‘Biology 2.0’ and we are excited to already be working with many innovators in this field. Of course, as with many deep tech companies, those involved in ‘Biology 2.0’ are very IP-rich, however, they often need significant capital investment before they can begin generating revenue. This requires a different model and mindset from investors and those involved in the field, as well as an effective IP strategy to match that can be used to monetise the IP assets.
Click here to read the full article
An increasing number of patent applications for blockchain related inventions have been filed around the world. Despite the large number of patent filings, there is still a dearth of blockchain-specific case law and some lack of clarity over exactly what is patentable, and to what degree.
Patent applications of course go hand in hand with developments in technology and in commercial focus. In this regard, we expect that a particular area of interest in the coming year will be non-fungible tokens, which have moved into the spotlight in the past year.
Click here to read the full article
During the COP26 summit held in October – November 2021, hundreds of governments, cities and businesses signed a declaration to work towards making all new vehicles release zero emissions by 2040 at the latest. In 2022, we can therefore expect to see a focus on innovation in battery technology, particularly energy storage solutions and fast charging inventions, to make electric vehicles (EVs) practical and affordable for all consumers.
During the climate change conference, there was also a renewed emphasis on the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. With power generation making up a significant proportion of total greenhouse gas emissions, we can expect to see further inventions and innovative developments in renewable energy technologies in 2022.
