Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 5, 2019
Date Accepted: Apr 13, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Technological Innovations on Diseases: Text Mining with US Patents
ABSTRACT
Background:
Patents are important intellectual property protection on technological innovations, which inspire efficient research and development in biomedicine. The number of patents serve as an important indicator of economic growth and technological innovation. Researchers have mined patents to characterize focuses and trends of technological innovations in many fields.
Objective:
The main focus of current patent mining in biomedicine is on recognition of biomedical entities. To expand biomedical patent mining and facilitate future resource allocation in biomedical research for the entire society, we investigated US patent data for uncovering the focuses and trends of protected technological innovations across the entire disease landscape.
Methods:
In this study, we analyzed more than 5 million US patent documents between 1995 and 2017, using summary statistics and topic modeling. More specifically, we investigated the disease coverage and latent topics in patent documents over time. We also incorporated the patent data into the calculation of our recently developed research opportunity index (ROI) and public health index (PHI), to recalibrate the resource allocation in biomedical research.
Results:
Our analysis showed that protected technological innovations have been primarily focused on social-economically critical diseases, such as diabetes mellitus and obesity. The entire society has improved significantly in the resource allocation in biomedical research and development over the past 2 decades, as illustrated by decreasing PHI. Diseases with positive ROI, such as spondylosis with myelopathy indicate potential research opportunities in future. Development of novel chemical or biological drugs, and electrical devices for diagnosis and disease management are the dominating topics in patented inventions.
Conclusions:
This multifaceted analysis of patent documents provides us a deep understanding of focuses and trends of technological innovations on diseases in patents. Our findings offer insights into future research and innovation opportunities and provide actionable information to facilitate policy makers, payers, and investors for better evidence-based resource allocation decision making in biomedicine.
Citation
