Blockchain is best known for cryptocurrencies, but a patent landscape study covering 491 patent families shows how firmly it has taken hold in the pharmaceutical and healthcare world. The study looked at who is filing, where inventions originate and which newcomers are worth watching, using keyword- and class-based searches across patent databases.

The big five

Five assignees lead the field. Cognitive Scale is the most prominent, with more than 14 patent families, many of them filed in 2016. IBM follows with 11, with its recent filings mostly claiming priority from the US. Netspective and Nokia each hold 10 families. Netspective’s filings centre on authenticating or verifying medical records with blockchain, while Nokia’s recent filings mostly claim priority from Finland. Walmart rounds out the top five with 8 families, largely US-priority.

Universities and research institutes together account for 29 patent families, and their recent filings are mostly Chinese in origin.

A US-led, China-chasing race

The United States is the single largest source of innovation, accounting for 49.69% of patent families by earliest priority country. China is second at 29.73%. The rest is spread thinly: the European Patent Office at 5.29%, Korea at 4.27%, Japan at 3.66% and India at 2.24%, with about 5% from other jurisdictions.

Protection follows a similar pattern. Looking at expanded families, 45.62% of patents and publications exist in the US, 11.26% in China and 7.73% at the EPO, with Japan, Canada and Australia each in the 4–5% range. About 14% are WO (international) publications. The study also notes that 2018 was the peak year for publications, followed by 2017, and that no patent in the set was found to be in litigation or opposition.

Academia is doing real work

Chinese universities are especially active. Fudan University filed three families between 2016 and 2018, most of them on using blockchain for patient record management. Chengdu University of Technology holds two families built on hash-table technology, one of which spans record management, data verification and payment operations. Hangzhou Dianzi University has two families from 2016–17, one using a distributed network ledger to authenticate data. In the US, Duke University has a patent on monitoring the environmental conditions of clinical items during delivery.

New entrants to watch

The study also highlights smaller or non-traditional players:

• Allied Bioscience (US) – a 2018 patent on an apparatus that identifies critical control points in facilities and sprays them with a self-sanitizing coating to limit infection spread, using a distributed ledger.
• Allocrypt Inc – a system for managing patient care in a facility using wireless devices and blockchain.
• Cognition Holdings – a distributed architecture for digitally authorizing access to computerized patient records.
• Invaryant Inc – a US health software company combining personal health records with blockchain-based verification of user data.
• Gould Ratner LLP – a Chicago law firm with a Chinese filing for a scalable blockchain system covering transactions, e-commerce, supply chain and medical uses.

What it means

The landscape is dominated by a handful of technology and enterprise names, but the presence of law firms, software start-ups, universities and individual inventors shows the space is still open. With around 72% of active, granted patents having more than ten years of remaining life, early movers have locked in long-lived positions, and newcomers will need to find niches in areas such as record exchange, authentication and supply-chain traceability.