Patent Insights - Immune Health
The purpose of this report is to provide HVN members with an update outlining patent
insights and trends in food based approaches to immune 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 are patents published after 25 April 2020, providing immune health outcomes through food/drink interventions. We excluded patents generally 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 relate generally to protection from viral respiratory diseases, non-viral respiratory conditions such as asthma or from pollution, anti-inflammation, immune-based skin conditions, immunity health linked to the gut microbiome, or general immunity. Bull’s Eye patents will also usually relate to foods, or food components 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 (e.g. there is poor scientific data to support the patent, or the patent is not focused primarily on immune health).
Background patents refer generally to immune health but not aligned on HVN focus. Unless otherwise specified, 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 or often are not solely focused on immune health. A full list of the Background patents is presented in section 5.
