The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on March 11 published the Patent Landscape Report on COVID-19-related vaccines and therapeutics to assist member states in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic and building back better as part of their sustainable post COVID economic recovery efforts.

This report provides early observations on the patenting activity which took place in the field of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, and compares these results with clinical trial data for related candidate vaccines and drugs.

The patent search looked at related patent filings from the beginning of 2020 through the end of September 2021. It revealed 5,293 patent filings on technologies related to COVID-19 in general, including 1,465 patent filings about therapeutics and 417 about vaccine development. By comparison, from 1941 to 2011 there were just over 500 patent filings related to active ingredients about the influenza vaccines (WIPO, 2012). Even during the SARS outbreak of the early 2000s, fewer than 1,000 related patents were published, with no vaccine candidate emerging.

The top five patent applicant locations in the field of vaccines are China, the US, the Russian Federation, the UK,and India. China filed 276 applications for patent families related to COVID-19 vaccine development from January 2020 to September 2021. In the field of therapeutics, China, the US, India, the Republic of Korea,and the Russian Federation are the top applicant locations. China filed 887 applications for therapeutics patents from January 2020 to September 2021. In addition, China has 34 COVID-19 vaccines in the development pipeline as of October, 2021, only next to the US, with 23 at the clinical stage and 11 at the preclinical stage.

The full text is available here.