Biotechnology has emerged as a progressing field at a very high pace and it is important to know that in the coming years the world of medicine might be changed with the help of biotechnological inventions.
Biotechnological inventions are themselves a good topic for discussion but in this blog article we will be discussing the filing trend of patents in biotechnology sector for all the countries around the world and also what is the current trend of patent filing for biotech inventions in India.
The data collected to carry out this analysis of biotech patents was obtained from the annual journals of WIPO and Indian Patent Office and the data submitted in this article is only till 2010.
First of all we will take up the patent filing trend around the world with respect to biotech inventions.
Patent Filing in Biotechnology Sector (Worldwide)
Year | No. of Patents |
2006 | 32311 |
2007 | 32242 |
2008 | 33564 |
2009 | 35802 |
2010 | 36362 |
The above table depicts the progress made by biotechnological industries in the field of patenting their innovations and from the above graph it can be calculated that the growth of patent filing in biotechnology sector is around 3%.
Biotech Patent Filings with respect to Countries
Countries | Patents filed for time period 2006-2010 |
Australia | 2413 |
Canada | 3225 |
Switzerland | 6586 |
China | 16163 |
Germany | 16232 |
Finland | 769 |
France | 7208 |
United Kingdom | 6661 |
Italy | 2161 |
Japan | 20210 |
Republic of Korea | 8229 |
Netherland | 4903 |
Russian Federation | 1754 |
Sweden | 1713 |
USA | 62881 |
Others | 27269 |
From the above table we can see that countries like US, China, Japan and Germany are involved at a high level for patenting of the biotech inventions. In this list we are not able to see the name of India as the filings made by India with regard to biotechnological innovations are very few as compared to the countries listed above.
The data for the trend of filing patents in biotechnology in India can be understood from the table below:
Year | No. of Patents |
2006-2007 | 2774 |
2007-2008 | 1950 |
2008-2009 | 1844 |
2009-2010 | 1303 |
2010-2011 | 1497 |
From the annual report of Indian Patent Office of 2010-2011, It has been estimated that Department of Biotechnology had filed only 34 patent applications till 2010.
Conclusion
It is very important to understand here that the whole world is trying to protect their innovation in biotechnology field but India is lagging behind. Indian inventors should get it straight and try to protect all their innovations of biotech field. This doesn’t apply only to the biotech inventions but also to the other areas of technology where India is lagging behind. It is not as if Indians are not working properly in the field of biotechnology but the reason is the failure to protect those inventions at time. India do have the potential to top the world in biotech field but the scientists/inventors have to work hard to take India to a higher level in the world biotech market.