Pharmaceutical patenting: the changing scene

The characteristics of patenting between 1978 and 1996 are reviewed, based primarily on applications published by the European Patent Office. Numbers of pharmaceutical applications have increased steadily, and there are now approximately 6,000 published each year, or 10% of the total. The Patent Cooperation Treaty option was generally unpopular with the industry until 1988, but now more than two-thirds of all pharmaceutical applications handled by the European office are from this source. Subject matter has drifted steadily away from heterocyclic chemistry into fields such as proteins, microbiology and analysis.