Mapping the IP Landscape

For those who can draw an informative patent map and work out a good navigational route through the complexities, there is an opportunity to gain significant competitive advantages through making the right partnerships, argue Quentin Tannock and Anna Duch.

The field of personalised medicine is diverse, and a dialogue with interested technology, patent and business experts needs to begin.

The US Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research has defined personalised medicine as “... using genetic or other biomarker information to make treatment decisions about patients”. The European Commission uses the term personalised medicine to refer to “a medical model using molecular profiling for tailoring the right therapeutic strategy for the right person at the right time, and/or to determine the predisposition to disease and/or to deliver timely and targeted prevention”.

Using either definition, personalised medicine includes a broad range of processes and technologies, across aspects of diagnostics, data analysis, treatments, treatment monitoring and related areas. We have summarised selected personalised medicine areas and indicated some interrelationships between these areas in Figure 1. These areas feature the application of both pre-existing technologies and emerging innovations, all of which can be the subject of patent applications.