Patent insights in controlled release and drug delivery research current trends.

The purpose of this review is to advance the field of Controlled Release and Drug Delivery by providing insights into the patenting and current intellectual property rights (IPR) data of the pertinent research. Patent registrations are filed on aspects of research applicable to the pharmaceutical industry. Studying the filing data and trends informs pharma researchers of (i) gaps in current applied knowledge in controlled release and drug delivery (where patents have not been filed) and (ii) prior knowledge (where patents have already been filed; patentability) and (iii) patent limitations to future applied research; Freedom to Operate). Our focus is on those intellectual property rights (IPR), mainly patents that are registered and germane to technical innovations and related products which are of interest to the Pharmaceutical Industry. These are patents and we thus exclude trade secrets, copyrights, franchises, or trademarks. Methods used for surveying the defined IPR landscape include searches of publicly available patent and PBR data and classifying the data according to the upstream–midstream–downstream innovation paradigm of the pharmaceutical industry. The findings reported suggest that the technical knowledge as expressed by patent filings of controlled release drug delivery innovations is growing commensurate to the economic and research activity. Much patent activity is in the downstream category of patient-oriented products and delivery systems for a very wide range of medical indications and disease conditions. Analysis of these data reveals the achievements and potential of controlled release technology in repurposing API`s and increasing their efficacy and widening their spectrum of utility.