Serious Money
FedInvent Portfolio Patents for March 8, 2022
Hello from FedInvent,
On Tuesday, which seems like a decade ago, the U.S. Patent Office issued 7,201 patents. One hundred fifty-six had taxpayer funding.
Here is the link to this week's FedInvent Patent Report. To browse by department, start here.
What We Learned This Week
Taxpayer-funded patents contain micro snapshots of the state of affairs of American life. The data is a little retrospective, given that the patents are usually about 18-24 months old. The issues remain. Here is some of what we learned.
On Influenza
For most of the last two years, we've watched COVID-19 explainers on CNBC and other media outlets from one of Mount Sinai's notable alumni, Scott Gottlieb. Dr. Gottlieb is the former commissioner of the FDA and is a Pfizer board member. In September 2021, Dr. Gottlieb reported that the 2021-2022 flu season would be a whopper. Fear of a double whammy — a COVID and flu simultaneous illness combo. Get your flu shot.
Inventors in New York were already working on it. U.S. Patent 11266734, "Influenza Virus Hemagglutinin Proteins and Uses Thereof," was issued to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The patent has four inventors, 27 claims, and 930 patent and non-patent literature prior art references. The patent, filed on June 14, 2017, reaches back to two provisional patent applications filed in June of 2016. Pre-COVID.
"The patent explains that Influenza A and B viruses are major human pathogens, causing a respiratory disease that ranges in severity from sub-clinical infection to primary viral pneumonia which can result in death. The clinical effects of infection vary with the virulence of the influenza strain and the exposure, history, age, and immune status of the host. The cumulative morbidity and mortality caused by seasonal influenza is substantial due to the relatively high attack rate. In a normal season, influenza can cause between 3-5 million cases of severe illness and up to 500,000 deaths worldwide. In the United States, influenza viruses infect an estimated 10-15% of the population."
"An effective way to protect against influenza virus infection is through vaccination; however, current vaccination approaches rely on achieving a good match between circulating strains and the isolates included in the vaccine. Such a match is often difficult to attain due to a combination of factors. First, influenza viruses are constantly undergoing change: every 3-5 years the predominant strain of influenza A virus is replaced by a variant that has undergone sufficient antigenic drift to evade existing antibody responses. Isolates to be included in vaccine preparations must therefore be selected each year based on the intensive surveillance efforts of the World Health Organization (WHO) collaborating centers. Second, to allow sufficient time for vaccine manufacture and distribution, strains must be selected approximately six months prior to the initiation of the influenza season. Often, the predictions of the vaccine strain selection committee are inaccurate, resulting in a substantial drop in the efficacy of vaccination."
"Since it is impossible to predict what subtype and strain of influenza virus will cause the next pandemic, current, strain-specific approaches cannot be used to prepare a pandemic influenza vaccine in advance of a pandemic. Thus, there is a need for vaccines that cross-protect subjects against different strains and/or subtypes of influenza virus."
Cross-protection is what was needed, so this is what they invented with taxpayer funding. So we followed the money.
The contracts cited on this patent reflect serious taxpayer funding.
The government interest statement on this patent says,
"This invention was made with government support under grant number HHSO100201500010C, awarded by Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, grant numbers 5T32A1007647, U19 AI109946, and 1P01AI097092, awarded by National Institutes of Health, and grant number HHSN272201400008C, awarded by Centers for Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance".
The BARDA contract was awarded to GlaxoSmithKline LLC in Research Triangle Park, NC. The contract, awarded in 2015, has $81,173,932.00 in obligated funds. The second contract, awarded to Icahn School of Medicine by NIH National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Centers for Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance, had $80,076,767.00 in funding. The contract was awarded in January 2014 with an end date in August 2022 has a total potential award value of $182,338,651.00. It includes $5,361,368.00 in COVID-19 funding. This is serious vaccine research funding.
The government classified this work as R&D — Medical: Biomedical (Applied Research/Exploratory Development.)
Back to Dr. Gottlieb
Luckily Dr. Gottlieb's concern about a whopper of an outbreak during the 2021-2022 flu season turned out to be unwarranted. All that mask-wearing, handwashing, and social distancing resulted in one of the lowest flu seasons on record. A lot of people got their flu shot.
On Navigating With Low Vision
Dr. Eli Peli, the leader of the Peli Lab at the Schepens Eye Research Institute at Massachusetts Eye and Ear invented a new way to use motion parallax to provide reliable depth cues for rendering images with a cluttered background for artificial vision, e.g., prosthetic or computer vision or visual sensory substitution devices, and thus improve object recognition. (11270451) From this patent, we learned:
"According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 39 million people worldwide are blind. In the United States, 1.2 million people are legally blind and .about.10% of them are functionally blind. Their numbers are projected to grow in the coming decades. Although blind people can access text through braille and text-to-speech, mobility indoors and outside is limited, dangerous, and largely depends on the long cane. Blindness also limits numerous other activities of daily living, particularly tasks requiring visual search and object recognition. As a result, many pursuits (vocational and social) are limited, especially for the acquired blind whose blindness occurs in adulthood. Restoration of vision through prostheses for restoring functional vision in blind users may address many of these difficulties."
Dr. Peli's work was funded by the Department of Defense United States Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC) Extramural Medical Research program. USAMRMC is headquartered in Fort Detrick, MD.
On Shellfish
"Molluscan shellfish are important aquaculture species. They support significant aquaculture industries worldwide. Major molluscan aquaculture species include oysters, clams, scallops, mussels, and abalone. Unlike livestock that have a long history of domestication, molluscan species are mostly wild and lack characteristics desired for aquaculture production."
The solution? Crossbreeding. Inventors from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, received U.S. Patent 11266131, "Molluscan Shellfish Produced by Controlled Crossbreeding." Their techniques improve aquaculture techniques for shellfish through progressive rotational crossbreeding. Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) funded this research.
Aquaculture is defined as farming aquatic organisms, including baitfish, crustaceans, food fish, mollusks, ornamental fish, sport or game fish, and other aquaculture products. Most people don't think shellfish are farmed.
According to the 2018 U.S. Census of Aquaculture, there are 884 mollusk farms in the U.S. Seven hundred, and one (701) of those farm mollusk farms produce oysters. Five hundred twenty-eight are on the East Coast. These aqua-farmed mollusks generate about $441M in sales in the U.S. each year. $284M of those sales is oysters.
In New Jersey, where people go down the shore to get to the ocean, the oyster sales for 2018, the last time the census was conducted, were $4.2M down from $8M in 2013,
On Nicotine
We learned that there are 29 drugs for depression and 33 for diabetes, but only three for smoking cessation.
"Nicotine is the addictive agent in cigarettes. Tobacco users alter their smoking behavior/smoke exposure to maintain nicotine plasma concentrations within a defined range (e.g., 10 to 50 ng/mL). Nicotine elimination occurs mainly through metabolism, and factors reducing nicotine metabolism may result in fewer cigarettes smoked per day due to nicotine concentrations being maintained for longer periods."
"Tobacco addiction is the leading global cause of preventable death. Aside from contributing to preventable death, tobacco addiction poses other substantial problems, such as diverting funds from other important health problems and disproportionately impacting lower-income families/individuals."
Unlike many disease states for which there are many treatment options to account for variability in patient response, currently, there are only three pharmacological approaches approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat nicotine addiction. These include nicotine replacement therapy, bupropion, and varenicline. By contrast, there are 29 drugs for depression and 33 for diabetes. Thus, there is a need for compounds that can reduce the urge to smoke (or consume other nicotine-containing products), thereby reducing the potential for adverse health implications.
Inventors from Pacific University in Forest Grove, OR, have invented a new compound that when administered at a rate at which nicotine is metabolized may be reduced, which in turn may reduce a desire for the individual to consume nicotine-containing products and may reduce exposure of individuals to carcinogenic substances over time. (11266610)
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at NIH funded this research.
Patents By the Numbers
On Tuesday, March 8, 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued 7,201 patents. One hundred fifty-six (156) of these patents benefitted from taxpayer funding. Here is how they break down.
One hundred forty-eight (148) patents have Government Interest Statements.
Thirty (30) have a government agency as an applicant or an assignee.
A federal department is the only assignee on 15 patents.
The 156 new patents have 178 department-level funding citations.
These patents are the work of 543 inventors.
The 521 American inventors come from 38 states and the District of Columbia.
The 22foreign inventors come from eight (8) countries.
There are 96 patents (62%) where at least one assignee is a college or university, the HERD.
Five patents (5) resulted from the collaboration between two or more universities. One patent has collaborators from a foreign university.
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) received 13 patents.
Nine (9) patents were assigned Y CPC symbols indicating that the invention may be useful in mitigating the impact of climate change.
The Big Three States
California has 18 first-named inventors and 77 total inventors.
Massachusetts has 18 first-named inventors and 49 total inventors.
New York has 15 first-named inventors and 46 total inventors.
Patent Count By Department
Count By Technology Center
There is one Re-Examined patent this week.
The Health Complex
The table below shows this week's count of the number of funding citations where the recipient cites the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the institutes at the National Institutes of Health, and other subagencies that are part of HHS, the Health Complex.
The Health Complex Year-To-Date
The table below is the year-to-date count for entities FedInvent classifies as part of the Health Complex.
Before We Go
We updated the Messages from Ukraine page with the latest news we've received from Ukraine. The correspondents are working diligently to protect important historical records. Sleeping is difficult. One writer says, "You have no idea how important it is for us to feel the support of the rest of the world!"
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The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.