Patent Insights - Infant Health
The purpose of this report is to provide HVN members with an update outlining patent insights and trends in food based approaches to infant 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 26 May 2020, providing infant health outcomes through oral interventions, with specific emphasis on the weaning period. 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 support infant nutrition with an immunity focus through prebiotics targeting the gut microbiome. Bull’s Eye patents will typically also be those utilising foods, nutrients or bioactives that have links to New Zealand’s food industry.
Halo patents are close to that defined as Bull’s Eye, but for one reason or another are not deemed of key relevance (e.g. utilising a probiotic rather than a prebiotic, poor scientific data, or the patent is not focused primarily on infant health).
Background patents refer generally to infant health but not aligned on HVN focus. These were not included in the 12-month analytics. A full list of the Background patents, which may include many of the traditional herbal medicine patents, is presented in section 5.
