"Biotech/Pharma" Top 47

    By Donald Zuhn —

The Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) released its 25th annual list of the top 300 organizations receiving U.S. patents.  Readers may recall that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office stopped releasing its annual list of top patent recipients in 2006 in order to "discourag[e] any perception that we believe more is better."

The IPO stated that while it does not intend for the report to "encourage or discourage patenting," it would continue to publish its annual list of top recipients because "the number of patents granted is one of the few objective measures of the patent system as a whole and the patenting activities of individual industries and companies."  The IPO compiled its list by counting the number of utility patents granted during 2007 on which an organization or its subsidiary was listed as the owner on the face of the patent.  However, the IPO attributed patents that were granted to two or more organizations jointly to the organization listed first on the patent.  The IPO noted that 153,283 patents were issued in 2007, which was a decline from the 173,771 patents that were issued in 2006.

As in 2007, we have used the IPO’s list of the top 300 patent holders to compile a list of the top "biotech and pharma" companies and organizations receiving U.S. patents in 2007 (this year, we were only able to fill out a list of 47 biotech/pharma companies and organizations).  Each organization’s IPO top 300 ranking is indicated in the "IPO Rank" column.  Please note that some of the companies and organizations listed below may be involved in non-biotech or non-pharma work, and therefore, that a portion of the patents granted to these companies may be directed to other than biotech and pharma-related inventions.  In addition, our list is a little inclusive in that we included medical device companies.

For additional information on this topic, please see:

• "IPO Posts List of Top 300 Patent Holders," April 20, 2007