Figure 2.
Families of Granted Patents in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The figure shows differences among patent offices in families of DNA-sequence-based patents. A patent family is the collection of patent applications and the granted patents arising from a single invention, usually stemming from the same original application. Hopkins et al. (111) “used Thomson Scientific’s GENESEQ and World Patent Index databases to identify patent families claiming human DNA and/or other nucleic acid sequences that were published from 1980--2003. Other data (e.g., legal status of granted patents) were obtained from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office online databases” (111, p. 185). Data from Reference (112) used with permission of the authors.