Patenting livestock microbiome tech: trends and takeaways
Attempts at reducing antibiotic use in livestock farming have driven an increase in inventive activity in the microbiome technology space over the past decade.
This involves the modulation of the animal’s microbiome to prevent bacterial infection, reducing the need for antibiotics and increasing welfare standards as well as product yield.
Patent landscape summary
In areas of growing innovation, we expect to see an increase in patent filing activity. So, to explore patent filing trends in this space, we searched applications filed between 2011 and 2021, having claims directed to the manipulation of the livestock microbiome, and analysed the results using Patently.
Filing activity seems to have peaked globally in 2017, but has since been in decline; although filing activity at the European Patent Office has remained stable since 2018.
The majority of recent filings globally have been made in China; although looking back to rights from similar applicants which were published three to five years ago, few of these gave rise to subsequent international applications.
Therefore, it would be fair to predict that many of the resulting monopolies from these rights will also be specific to China. For applicants in Europe, such applications represent a significant body of prior art, which could be relevant to patentability. Conscientious applicants in Europe and elsewhere would do well to perform additional prior art searching of Chinese language publications.
Outside of China, the most prominent owner of patent rights in this category is Novozymes, a biotech headquartered in Denmark, which holds a diverse portfolio directed to probiotic animal feeds; and a range of antibiotic alternatives. These include Bacillus strains, which have activity against Lawsonia intracellularis infection (WO2019152791); methods of decreasing pathogenic bacteria in poultry hatcheries using Bacillus and Lactobacillus strains (WO2017132230); and methods of treating salmonella in chickens with B. Subtilis (WO2021055474).
