I have had a life long fascination with inventions and the inventive process.  How does the inventive process work?  In an excellent article titled “In the Air, Who says big ideas are rare?” by Malcolm Gladwell published in the May 12, 2008 issue of the New Yorker, gave some insight into the inventive process.  Gladwell eloquently argues that inventions and great ideas do not occur de novo but rather such inventions and ideas predicate on knowledge that have been previously accumulated.  He also paraphrases the famous sociologist Rober K. Merton:

“A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.”

Gladwell’s article suggests the notion of “multiples” in which there are numerous thinkers out there with access to the same information.  The possibility of several thinkers simultaneously coming up with the same great idea is a more frequent occurrence than we think.  Gladwell’s original article illustrates such occurrences with many fascinating case histories.

The US Patent system is based on the first-to-invent concept.  Thus, if more than one inventor files for the same invention, the patent is awarded to the person who is able to demonstrate that he is the first to reduce the invention to practice.  For patent systems in the rest of the world the first-to-file principle is followed.  In this case, regardless of the number of “multiples”, the first inventor to file takes precedent.
When there are two US patent applications or when there is a pending US application and an issued US patent of less than a year old claiming the same invention, an “interference proceeding” may be held to determine which inventor should take precedent.  “Multiples” are not uncommon in medical device inventions.  A surgeon sees a problem and comes up with a solution (invention).  Another surgeon also sees the same problem and may come up with a similar or an identical solution. 
Interference particularly in the biotech industry can be a high stake game and may drag on for years.  I have written about the Cabilly patent in a previous blog and have recently followed the story with an update.

FDA is an agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is mandated to regulate through its subdivisions Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDHR) for medical devices and Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) for drugs with respect to safety and efficacy.  In addition to safety and efficacy, FDA regulates almost every facet of prescription drugs and use of medical devices, including testing, manufacturing, labeling, advertising and marketing.   The intent is to protect the public against fraudulent claims and to ensure safety of the consumers.  The intent of FDA is not to regulate the practice of medicine.  Within this context, a drug or medical device that has been approved by FDA for a specific use can at the discretion of the physician be legally used for conditions other than those approved by FDA.  Such practice is called the off-label use of an FDA approved product and the rules of the game are changing, at least for the companies. 

Companies have in the past have been prohibited to promote drugs or medical devices for uses that have not been specifically approved by FDA.  The leeway for companies to make such promotions may widen slightly.  The new guidelines (draft for public comments) would permit manufacturers and companies to distribute reprints from peer-reviewed journal articles.  Several categories of reprints are prohibited under this guideline including special supplements, letters to the editor, early-stage trials in healthy patients, and articles that are “inconsistent with the weight of credible evidence.”

This move by FDA is not without controversy.  As reported in WSJ Health Blog Randall Lutter, FDA deputy commissioner for policy stated that  ”Articles that discuss unapproved uses of FDA-approved drugs and devices can contribute to the practice of medicine and may even constitute a medically recognized standard of care,”.  Lutter maintained that “This guidance also safeguards against off-label promotion.”

Not everyone agrees with this latest intended move by FDA to what some deemed as facilitation of off-label use.  A particularly vocal opponent of this FDA initiative is Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat.  He wrote a cautionary letter to the FDA citing danger of such a move as potentially short circuiting the FDA regulatory process and opens the door to abusive marketing.  He quoted Senator Estes Kefauver warning that if promotion of unapproved uses was allowed, “the expectation would be that the initial claim would tend to be quite limited, which, of course, would expedite approval of the new drug application.”  The implication here is that companies would then “promote” and “widen” the unapproved indications through the distribution of reprints from peer-reviewed journal articles touting the off-label use of such drug or device.  The controversy remains if this is after all necessarily a bad thing and not to the interest of the public.

Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on this issue.

There is a marked contrast between the US and Canadian health care systems.  Having worked in both systems, I have often compared them staying as in Days Inn as the only choice (for Canadians) as opposed to the US system where you have a choice of staying either at the Hilton and or the Budget Motel.  The freedom to choose comes at a price and some may say too much.  An opinion piece published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine on Feb 7, 2008 blaming the failure of market forces to deliver optimal health care is surely going raise this issue to the next level of debate in this election year.  This article is written by Robert Kuttner, a well known and well respected left-leaning liberal writer-commentator.  He is the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect,  “an authoritative magazine of liberal ideas,” according to its mission statement.

He crafted very cogent arguments for his point of view against a backdrop of the US health care system being an outlier against international practices.  Medicare statistics indicate that the average cost of health care for every person in the United States is $7,000 and this amounts to over $2.1 trillion.  He offered an alternative interpretation how the US health care system ended in the current extreme state of failure.  He stated that the pervasive commercialization of health care not only did not create an efficient market but has unintended consequences contributing to the massive market failure.   Kuttner claims that market forces for cost containment are generally targeted at maximizing shareholder values and the burden has fallen on the primary care physicians with increased case load, relying on tests rather than hands on diagnostic skill and referring to specialists when none is necessary.

Read more…

We are currently working in stealth mode on a journal article management plus academic networking software.  This has been previewed by a limited and trusted audience.  The initial reaction was why are you doing another one when there is already Endnotes and now Zotero out there.  I needed justification and inspiration as to why we are doing this as I am funding this project myself.

I am sure Steve Job was confronted with the same type of skepticism when he worked on iTune, iPod and iPhone.  Then I began to do more research on this including viewing all the videos of Steve Jobs posted on Youtube.  It was an interesting journey of discovery including re-reading Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford which I read more than 2 years ago.   Here is the full text……

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005 at Stanford.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Each year Time Magazine in conjunction with CNN come up with a list of best inventions for various categories.  Because of the large number of categories and each invention is listed on separate page (I guess for more advertising opportunities), it is cumbersome to go through all of them.  I have condensed the best inventions on the Health category into a single page.  The best invention in my opinion for the health category is….

1. PowerFoot One, is the world’s first actively powered foot ankle prosthesis.  The inventor an MIT professor is himself a double amputee.  The secret to long battery life is to recapture energy during walking.
   Time Link       iWalk
2. Schizophrenic mouse.  Akira Sawa of John Hopkins has been studying how variants of a gene called DISC1 increase the risk of schizophrenia.  The Sawa Laboratory has developed a schizophrenic mouse model that will some day lead to better understanding and perhaps better treatment for this debilitating form of mental illness.  This research group is trying to match findings obtained in patients with schizophrenia with those from animal models using MRI and PET.
   Time Link       Sawa Laboratory
3. Blood Type Conversion System.  Group O blood is highly desirable for blood transfusion because the red blood cells do not have A antigen or B antigen on their cell surfaces.  As such it can be transfused to patients with Group A, Group B or Group AB blood type and of course also to patients with Group O.  Therefore Group O blood type is also known as universal donor blood.  Danish scientists have discovered two bacterial enzymes that will cleave the sugar molecules eliminating the A and B antigens and thus converting the blood essentially to Group O blood.
   Time Link       ZymeQuest
4. Do it Right.  In the heat of a CPR resuscitation one can over compress or under compress the chest.  Worst still because of the intensity of the situation at hand (pardon the pun), we tend to compress the chest at a higher rate than is usually recommended.  A group of final year engineering student from McMaster University came up with a simple and elegant solution to this problem.  Sensors embedded in neoprene glove detect the pressure exerted by the palm and also keep track of the rate of compression.  The data feed back to the machine is used to determine the type of verbal cues offered to the resuscitator such as “compress faster”.
   Time Link       CPRGolove
5. Prognosticating Cancer Recurrence.  Amsterdam-based Agendia molecular diagnostics was one of the first companies to be approved under FDA’s new In Vitro Diagnostic Multivariate Index Assay (IVDMIA) Guidelines for their diagnostic kit for breast cancer prognosis.  Agendia’s proprietary gene expression analysis can identify older breast cancer patients at low risk for metastatic disease.  This valuable information can be use clinically to decide which treatment regime to use for specific breast cancer patients.
   Time Link       Agendia

My favorite invention this year is the cprGlove.  Simple and elegant solution to an unmet need.

FreePatentsOnline is currently one of the most popular patent databases. It offers search options not available from USPTO like word stemming, proximity search and you can save your search queries in user accounts.

On the other hand, Google Patent Search up the ante by allowing users to search for keywords within the text images. This makes Google the leader when it comes to ferreting out older patents which are stored only as image files.

We tried to combine the best of both worlds in WizPatent Express.  WizPatent Express allows you to batch download patents for FREE. Save your search queries and patents directly into your harddrive for quick access and increased confidentiality.

The design philosophy of Patent Express is to make the searchand retrieval of patents as easy as possible.   You don’t have to waste time learning a new search interface as WizPatent Express directly abstracts all search results from public databases like USPTO, Espacenet, and even popular patent databases - FreePatentsOnline and Google Patent Search. You can continue searching the way you are used to.

We have made WizPatent Express into a convenient package and fully integrated it with Internet Explorer.  However you need to install Dotnet Framework 2.0 from Microsoft.  Although we make Dotnet Framework installation automatic, Microsoft has made the DotNet Framework pretty bulky and you may find installation a bit tedious.  Sorry not our fault as the installation of WizPatent Express itself is pretty fast.

You can download a free trial version of WizPatent Express here:
http://www.wizpatent.com/Express/Pages/RequestDemo.aspx

The trial version has all the functionalities of a paid version.

Appreciate your feedback.

In designing medical devices or developing new products in the biotech industry, patent review is part and parcel of the due diligence process prior to committing resources into a project. Increasingly the engineers or scientists either by themselves or in consultation with IP professionals, have to make some kind of freedom-to-operate determination. Often times such decisions are subjective. The recent ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on “willful infringement” could make things a little easier for the engineers and scientists…. 

This ruling revolves around the concept of “willful infringement” whereby the infringer is shown to have a willful intent to infringe. If “willful intent” is proven then the court can award punitive damage which is a discretionary award of up to three times actual damages. This is distinct from the case in which infringement occurred on the basis of carelessness on the part of the infringer.

For the past 24 years the standard for “willful infringement” required the patent owners merely to show that the infringer knew about the patent and failed to take the necessary step to avoid infringement. This standard has shifted towards a higher burden of prove when the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled on some discovery issues (process of collecting evidence before trial) from a patent infringement case brought against Seagate by MIT and Convolve. With this new ruling, the proof of “willful infringement” now requires proof that an accused infringer “acted despite an objectively high likelihood that its actions constituted infringement of a valid patent”

This recent ruling means that scientists and engineers involved in developing new products have a little more room to maneuver. On the other hand, patent owners will have a more difficult task of proving “willful infringement” to collect punitive damages.

Links:

You can read the whole decision here.

The patents involved in the lawsuit are:

US 4,916,635

US 6,314,473

What did Wall Street Journal said?

 A Japanese company (Toyota) and an American company (Ford) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.

On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile….

The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action. Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the American team had eight people steering and one person rowing.

Feeling a deeper study was in order, the American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing. Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team’s management structure was totally reorganized to four steering supervisors, three area steering superintendents and one assistant superintendent steering manager. They also implemented a new performance system that would give the one person rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the ‘Rowing Team Quality First Program,’ with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rower.

There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices and bonuses. The next year the Japanese won by two miles.

Humiliated, the American management laid off the rower for poor performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses and the next year’s racing team was out-sourced to India .

Sadly, The End. Sad, but oh so true!

Here’s something else to think about: Ford has spent the last thirty years moving all its factories out of the US , claiming they can’t make money paying American wages. Toyota has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US .

The last quarter’s results: Toyota makes 4 billion in profits while Ford racked up 9 billion in losses. Ford folks are still scratching their heads.

IF THIS WASN’T SO SAD IT MIGHT BE FUNNY!!!!

Thanks to LCDC Mike Sieverson for this little story.

What is your opinion?

The above piece was reproduced from the Blog called Bob’s Thought under a Creative Commons License.

Jim Larrick, MD PhD runs a private research institute called Panorama Research in Mountain View, California (a stone throw from Google headquarter).  This private research institute competes on equal terms with academic institutions for research grants from NIH and other federal agencies including SBIR grants.  Jim has founded 14 biotech companies out of Panorama Research of which 4 have gone IPO (some through mergers).  This is not a bad record for a private research institute.  Many universities would have love such a track record.

Jim is first and foremost a maverick; not the type that will fit well in an academic institution.  He is not only an entrepreneur but also a consummate scientist with a solid track record of having published over 240 peer review journal articles.  He published one of the first books on oncogene with Ed Liu, currently the Executive Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore.

He was recently in Africa with the Sanofa Center for African Dance & Culture.  The purpose of this trip was to promote AIDS awareness through the medium of dance.  Jim’s production company, Slick Production (no kidding), produced a moving documentary in HDTV format about this trip.  You can view a sample of the documentary from here and a new trailer from here.

Google’s motto is “Do No Evil”. This makes good business sense as Google’s business model depends entirely on users’ trust which over time morphed into an addiction-like dependency on Google’s technology. Can you imagine a day without Google search? Part of the addiction-like dependency is derived from an atmosphere of a “free buffet” when using Google technology. Doing a Google search is like attending a free buffet; it is free, you can have as much as you want and the quality is usually quite good.

I reported in December that Google has launched patent search service (“Google Patent Search is Hot“). The major deficiencies are you cannot print or download a copy of the PDF file. No more ………..

Google Patent Search has just added a download PDF function. Look for the [Download PDF] button in the patent’s About page. This button is located under Patent summary column and is the second button below the thumbnail view. Click here to see an example. Try it. The download is blindingly fast. The PDF is also very compact and we suspect Google is using JBIG2 compression. This new service by Google will certainly impact on competitive services like FreePatentOnline, IP Discover, Patent Hunter, Pat2PDF and Delphion.

Updated May 14, 2007: Yes, Google PDFs uses JBIG2 image compression. There is no free lunch even at a buffet (pardon the pun). Google’s PDFs are compact and download very fast but the image quality is to be desired.

WizPatent Manager is a patent document management software. This software download patent documents such as text files and PDFs from public sources such as USPTO and Espacenet. The software is fully compatible with these database but is also seamlessly integrated with the native search interface of USPTO, Espacenet, FreePatentOnlin and Google Patent Search. We have just released WizPatent Manager Version 80. Unfortunately there was not enough time to do include the feature of direct import of PDF from Google Patent Search in the current version. We will include this feature in our next release.

What’s new in WizPatent Manager Ver 80

1. WizPatent Manager Version 80 is now fully compatible with popular patent databases - FreePatentsOnline and Google Patents Search.

2. “Search and Retrieve” Panel now includes tabs for the search pages for major patent databases. You can now save your search queries and patent documents directly off USPTO, Espacenet, FreePatentsOnline and Google Patents Search WebPages into your patent collection.

3. Patent documents directly imported from the Patent Search Tabs will be stored automatically in Patent Collections after download. A pop-up message will inform you when they have been transferred to your collection.

4. You may now use filters to search by 4 new fields in your patent collection - Inventors, Assignees, as well as by keywords in both Annotations and Whole Text Document.

5. As USPTO was updating their PAIR website, you may have had problems assessing PAIR. We are pleased to inform you that we have re-integrated USPTO’s PAIR ability into WizPatent Manager and you should have no more problems accessing PAIR.

6. All patent documents now show which database source they were downloaded from for your convenience.

7. WIPO and EPO now show 15 search results per page and WizPatent Manager has been updated to capture the full set of search results.