The global patent landscape of emerging infectious disease monkeypox.

BACKGROUND: Monkeypox is an emerging infectious disease with confirmed cases and deaths in several parts of the world. In light of this crisis, this study aims to analyze the global knowledge pattern of monkeypox-related patents and explore current trends and future technical directions in the medical development of monkeypox to inform research and policy. METHODS: A comprehensive study of 1,791 monkeypox-related patents worldwide was conducted using the Derwent patent database by descriptive statistics, social network method and linear regression analysis. RESULTS: Since the 21st century, the number of monkeypox-related patents has increased rapidly, accompanied by increases in collaboration between commercial and academic patentees. Enterprises contributed the most in patent quantity, whereas the initial milestone patent was filed by academia. The core developments of technology related to the monkeypox include biological and chemical medicine. The innovations of vaccines and virus testing lack sufficient patent support in portfolios. CONCLUSIONS: Monkeypox-related therapeutic innovation is geographically limited with strong international intellectual property right barriers though it has increased rapidly in recent years. The transparent licensing of patent knowledge is driven by the merger and acquisition model, and the venture capital, intellectual property and contract research organization model. Currently, the patent thicket phenomenon in the monkeypox field may slow the progress of efforts to combat monkeypox. Enterprises should pay more attention to the sharing of technical knowledge, make full use of drug repurposing strategies, and promote innovation of monkeypox-related technology in hotspots of antivirals (such as tecovirimat, cidofovir, brincidofovir), vaccines (JYNNEOS, ACAM2000), herbal medicine and gene therapy.

A conformal regressor for predicting negative conversion time of Omicron patients.

In light of the situation and the characteristics of Omicron, the country has continuously optimized the rules for the prevention and control of COVID-19. The global epidemic is still spreading, and new cases of infection continue to emerge in China. To facilitate the infected person to estimate the course of virus infection, a prediction model for predicting negative conversion time is proposed in this article. The clinical features of Omicron-infected patients in Shandong Province in the first half of 2022 are retrospectively studied. These features are grouped by disease diagnosis result, clinical sign, traditional Chinese medicine symptoms, and drug use. These features are input to the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model, and the output is the predicted number of negative conversion days. At the same time, XGBoost is used as the underlying algorithm of the conformal prediction (CP) framework, which can realize the probability interval estimation with a controllable error rate. The results show that the proposed model has a mean absolute error of 3.54 days and has the shortest interval prediction result. This shows that the method in this paper can carry more decision-making information and help people better understand the disease and self-estimate the course of the disease to a certain extent.

What, Where, When and How of COVID-19 Patents Landscape: A Bibliometrics Review.

Two years after COVID-19 came into being, many technologies have been developed to bring highly promising bedside methods to help fight this epidemic disease. However, owing to viral mutation, how far the promise can be realized remains unclear. Patents might act as an additional source of information for informing research and policy and anticipating important future technology developments. A comprehensive study of 3741 COVID-19-related patents (3,543 patent families) worldwide was conducted using the Derwent Innovation database. Descriptive statistics and social network analysis were used in the patent landscape. The number of COVID-19 applications, especially those related to treatment and prevention, continued to rise, accompanied by increases in governmental and academic patent assignees. Although China dominated COVID-19 technologies, this position is worth discussing, especially in terms of the outstanding role of India and the US in the assignee collaboration network as well as the outstanding invention portfolio in Italy. Intellectual property barriers and racist treatment were reduced, as reflected by individual partnerships, transparent commercial licensing and diversified portfolios. Critical technological issues are personalized immunity, traditional Chinese medicine, epidemic prediction, artificial intelligence tools, and nucleic acid detection. Notable challenges include balancing commercial competition and humanitarian interests. The results provide a significant reference for decision-making by researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and investors with an interest in COVID-19 control.