Humans frequently experience tissue dysfunctioning and damage; however, not in all cases, the body’s tissue regeneration ability allows full recovery from the incurred injury. The conventional method of treating such trauma entails the transplantation of injured tissues or organs. However, this is related to several drawbacks, such as the lack of compatible donors, possibility of graft rejection and post-operative problems.

The other approach involves the integration of cells, growth factors and scaffolds, in order to build a three-dimensional (3D) functional tissue that imitates the human tissue; this method is less efficient, takes more time and may cause non-homogeneous cell distribution in the matrix. As a result, 3D bioprinting is nowadays being explored to create intricate anatomical structures in a layer-wise form with the help of computerized technology. The technique has high precision, superior resolution, fast processing time and is economical.

Various industry as well as non-industry players are constantly collaborating to advance the 3D bioprinting technology for use in different fields, such as drug testing, toxicology screening, cancer research, and fabricating bone, cartilage and organs (for transplantation).

The current IP landscape features the presence of over 3,300 patents focused on 3D bioprinting and associated innovations. It is worth mentioning that more than 20% of patents (belonging to simple families) are granted patents.

More than half of the patents (both granted patents and applications pending for approval) related to 3D bioprinting have more than 15 years of exclusivity, indicating that this is a nascent field of research. Further, the IP landscape features the presence of over 770 applicants, including established companies, as well as academic institutes.

Various focus areas of the patents

It is worth mentioning that the innovation area of close to 80% of the patents is centrally aligned to the scope of report whereas 20% of the patents are focused in the innovation areas which are peripheral to the scope of the project. Additionally, around 40% of the patents were focused on innovations featuring different 3D bioprinted materials, followed by patents focusing on technological advances in 3D bioprinting (17%).

Recent innovations in the 3D bioprinting domain

The value of a patent not only resides within the time it must expire, but also depends on several other parameters that determine whether the patent is of a greater importance or not. The more value a patent application acquires, corresponds to it being more novel and technically advanced in the domain. An approximate valuation of a patent must generally consider both qualitative and quantitative aspects of the IP documents being analyzed.

Majority (75%) of the IP documents in the 3D bioprinting domain are patent applications (of these, around 2% are ranked amongst highly valued innovations). Further, most of the rank 1 granted patents / applications have more than 15 years till expiry.

key aspects of inventions

We identified 10 CPC families as key pockets of innovation; interestingly, the most frequently mentioned family in the dataset is related to the method of manufacturing 3D bioprinting. Further, the majority (22%) of the patents belong to the A61 CPC family, followed by patents belonging to the C12N family (16%).

Ability to attain exclusivity in future

Based on the white space analysis, the emerging areas of innovation within the 3D bioprinting domain were identified, focusing on different 3D bioprinting systems. Presently, the majority of innovations are observed to be focused on different methods of bioprinting and application of the 3D bioprinting process. However, various areas, such as bioprinting using machine learning, bioprinting of cell / cellular structure and composition of bioprinting material were identified as potential white spaces.

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