Friday, August 11, 2006

Patents in the medical device industry

Is the spinal device industry on the wane?

 

 

 

Looking at the aggregate patent data some interesting clues with regards to industry trend may be gathered. From the graph above it is obvious that the Joint Replacement (excluding spine), external bone fixators and pacemakers are matured technologies. In the last 10 years the stent and spinal device industries have dominated the medical device market. Although both stent and spinal device issued patents dropped in the last 2 years, the spinal device IP shows a more dramatic drop in the last year. This trend begs the question ‘Is the spinal device industry on the wane?’

This may not be the whole story. We need to be cognizance of what is in the pipeline. To have a better assessment we need to look at the number of published patents. You will note that Year 2004 saw a bumper crop of 622 published patents and this from our estimates will most likely be issued 6 to 18 months from the published date.  Thus we suspect the dip in the number of issued spine patents in 2005 may only be temporary.  In an upcoming blog we will discuss the spinal device industry in more detail. 

 

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