According to the evaluation based on a new online platform on “technologies to fight cancer,” the country was responsible for 647 “international patent families” between 2002 and 2021. This puts Austria in the middle, with Denmark, which is in front of it, having 1,415 patents.
The term “International Patent Families” (IPF) refers to inventions that have been registered for patents in two or more countries. According to the evaluation, Germany is clearly ahead across Europe and the EU with 9,375 IPFs between 2002 and 2021. They are followed by Great Britain (6,070), France (5,078) and Switzerland (4,812). Well ahead of Austria are Sweden (1,752) and Belgium (1,551), in addition to Denmark, other countries that are comparable in terms of population.
“Important contribution”
Ireland is similar to Austria with 616 IPFs, followed at a somewhat respectful distance by Norway, Finland, Turkey and Poland. For the President of the Austrian Patent Office, Stefan Harasek, inventors in this country “make an important contribution to this socially important area of research and provide impetus for the fight against cancer.”
If you calculate the number of patent applications based on the number of inhabitants, Switzerland leads the ranking by a wide margin. There are 555 patents per million inhabitants. In this evaluation, Austria ranks twelfth in Europe (72.6 patents per million), according to the paper.
Overall, development has gained significant momentum worldwide in recent years: especially from 2015 onwards, the curve of annual innovations in this area has shown a steep upward trend, according to the report “Patents and Innovations against Cancer”. This lists a total of around 140,000 relevant developments worldwide between 1971 and 2021. Due, among other things, to advances in the diagnosis and treatment of many cancers, around 5.4 million cancer deaths were avoided in the EU between 1988 and 2022.
Strong further development
According to the evaluation, the areas of immunotherapy and gene therapy have developed significantly, with IPF numbers roughly doubling between 2015 and 2021, as well as new approaches to cancer diagnostics, for example through blood sample analyses. In the latter field, patent activity even increased fivefold. In the area of health informatics, development is moving strongly towards cancer detection with the support of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) methods.
The main driver of these further developments continues to be the USA: between 2002 and 2021, almost 50 percent of the relevant patent-pending innovations came from there. During this period, Europe is still in second place with 18 percent. However, the evaluation shows China already on par or slightly ahead compared to Europe in 2020 and 2021. Although Europe is “second in developing cancer-related technologies, we clearly can and must do more – especially considering that an increase in cancer diagnoses is predicted in the coming years,” said EPO President António Campinos.
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