Patenting Trends in Global Healthcare Start-ups

Abstract

Start-up companies represent a powerful engine of the innovation process. The current study aims to establish a better understanding of the Start-up ecosystem in providing innovative healthcare solutions through the lens of intellectual property and relate it to policy gaps for supporting the Start-up ecosystem in India. This study found that about 397 healthcare Start-up companies have been established after 1 January 2010. The Questel Orbit database was used to conduct a patent search for the patents filed by these Start-ups from 1 January 2010 to 1 May 2020. A total of 3527 patents were retrieved and analyzed thoroughly to generate insights on the year-wise patent filing trend, geographical patent filing density, top aggressive patent filers, sector-wise filing density and a glimpse ofthe patent filing culture of healthcare Startups in India. The result shows that major filing has been done in the field of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology; and major healthcare market is the USA. Despite the Start-up culture being relatively new in India, the country’s healthcare Start-ups are among the top 10 patent filers globally. It is observed that Verily Life Sciences is the top healthcare patent filer globally and SigTuple is the top patent filer from India.