Patent Insights - Digestive Health
The purpose of this report is to provide HVN members with an update outlining patent
insights and trends in food based approaches to digestive health since the June 2020 report. The outputs of this report are:
• an executive summary;
• patent trends and insights over the past year, and in comparison to the landscape over the past 20 years; and
• trends and insights from the Bulls Eye and Halo patents published over the past 12 months; and
• details and access (through web-links) to each new patent in this review period.
This report should not be taken as specific advice relating to your intellectual property strategy, freedom to operate, commercial or legal matters. You should always seek your own independent advice relating to your situation. IPSynergy is happy to help.
Relevant patents included in this report are those published after 17 May 2020, providing digestive health outcomes through any food/beverage interventions. We excluded patents if they were focused on pharmaceutical drugs, therapeutic treatments of disease states (opposed to preventative approaches of interest), synthetic compounds / molecules, recombinant technology or genetically engineered material, non-human animal treatments, non-oral routes of intervention, and diagnostics.
Bull's Eye patents related to healthy digestion and wellbeing through positive action within the gut microbiome, digestive comfort (e.g. reduction in bloating, constipation or diarrhoea) and/or digestive health linked to secondary health outcomes particularly immunity or metabolic health. Bull’s Eye patents will typically use foods, nutrients of bioactives that have links to New Zealand’s food industry.
Halo patents are similar to Bull’s Eye, but for one reason or another are not deemed of key relevance, for instance there may be poor scientific data, or the patent is not focused primarily on digestive health.
Background patents refer generally to digestive health but not aligned on HVN focus. These were not included in the 12-month analytics. Many traditional herbal medicines (THM) approaches we found are classed as background patents because they utilise food components which are not relevant to HVN and often not solely focused on digestive health. A full list of the Background patents is presented in section 5.
