SPTO "Spanish Patent and Trademark Office" has released its first newsletter on technological surveillance related to COVID-19

This first newsletter provides an overview of the current situation in the research against this type of virus and how it has been evolving since 2004.

Therefore, patent applications published worldwide in relation to diseases caused by Coronavirus in humans will be published quarterly in this bulletin to enable public access to patents on this subject that are published worldwide related to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases caused by coronaviruses in humans.

The first newsletter, published by the end of March, includes a compilation of patent applications published from 2018 to March 2020, divided into four sections, an example of each of them as follows: 

It should be pointed out that the first patents related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus disease have not yet been published, since the 18 months that all national and international legislation requires must elapse from the time the patent application is filed to its publication. 

Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to point out that the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (SPTO) has published in this first bulletin an analysis of the families of patents, related to the Coronavirus, published since 2004, date used as a starting point to analyze the evolution of the patent applications filed after the first outbreak of SARS, which occurred in 2002. A total of 701 patent families (corresponding to 2070 applications) have been found following the study. The year with the highest number of publications was 2005, with a total of 177 patents published, while 2011 and 2012 were the worst years in this respect, with only 13 patent applications published in each of them. The country with the highest number of patent applications has been China, followed by the United States of America and the Republic of Korea.