Test your patent-searching skills!
The esp@cenet quiz is an exercise proposed to our readers. Its aim is to show that patent searching can be an exciting quest, yielding relevant results in almost all technical fields.
New quiz: The magic key
Do you ever wonder, on leaving the house, whether you have really locked the door? Try to retrieve patents relating to keys that indicate if you have locked your door or not.
Last Quiz: Nanoshells to fight cancer
"A GROUP OF Texas researchers injected the nanoshells - so small it would take 5,000 of them to reach the size of a poppy seed - into tumors in mice. They then exposed the tumors to near infrared radiation, heating them enough to kill the cancer but without injuring nearby normal tissue."
"Nanoshells should work in most soft tissue tumors but would be most effective on cancers that can't be removed surgically because they're in an awkward location, such as in the brain, the researchers said."
"In the area where nanoshells were injected, within minutes of heating with doses of near-infrared light the cancer cells died (PNAS)"
"The bullets are tiny gold-coated silica particles, known as nanoshells, that can be injected into a cancer then heated with a special light".
These are excerpts of a recent article on a promising technology to fight cancer.
More on BBC news:
news.bbc.co.uk
Try to find patents covering this technology and neighbouring fields.
Your search could aim to gain an initial idea of who owns this technology in order to seek research collaborations.
Solution to the last quiz
This search can be approached from two angles, one being via a normal state of the art search directly using the patent database. Another way to get results can consist in obtaining information from the Web on possible inventors' first names and using these to further the search in patent databases.
First Method: define the concepts best covering the invention - common technical features that may be found in patents relating to the subject - and per concept, define the most comprehensive set of synonyms covering it.
In this case, the following concepts - groups of synonyms covering one aspect - can be defined:
- cancer, tumor
- nano*, micro*,
- shells, bullet, ball
- heat*, infrared, radiation, light.
"cancer" and "nano*" and "radiat*" entered as a keywords in the title and abstract fields yield the following interesting patent document:
WO0002590 RADIATION AND NANOPARTICLES FOR ENHANCEMENT OF DRUG DELIVERY IN SOLID TUMORS
This document seems to relate to our invention as it comes from the University of Texas and relates to the searched subject. The question that remains, is whether there are other patents covering our invention.
There is no unique strategy for obtaining this information. One can consist in conducting a broad search for patents held by the same inventor or by retrieving all patents held by the University of Texas in the cancer treatment field. Neither of these strategies yield much more precise results.
Second method: combining Web information with patent sources
If Google is used to search for pages mentioning "patent" and "cancer" and "nanoshells", the following
list
will be obtained.
From this list one can consult the
following page
, indicating:
"Halas Wins Innovator Award in Fight Against Breast Cancer"
The Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program has chosen Naomi Halas of Rice University to receive the prestigious Innovator Award for ongoing research into novel ways to use nanotechnology to diagnose and treat breast cancer. The award includes a four-year, $3 million grant, which Halas will use to develop new noninvasive methods of detecting and eradicating tumors.
Halas, the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of chemistry, is the inventor of metal nanoshells, a novel type of nanoparticle with "tunable" optical properties.
From this information we can look for patent held by Mrs Halas. This search yields a
long list of 107 patents
.
In this list there are many patents that could cover the searched invention:
US6685986 Metal nanoshells
US6645517 Temperature-sensitive polymer/nanoshell composites for photothermally modulated drug delivery
US6530944 Optically-active nanoparticles for use in therapeutic and diagnostic methods
From these results, it appears that this technology may be held by various inventors. The product itself is most probably covered by several patents like the ones we have retrieved.
Additional information on this technology can be obtained from the site of
Nanospectra
, a start-up created to exploit this technology.
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