Temporal Trends in the United States Patent Landscape: Innovation in Cardiology Across Industry and Academia

Novel approaches to diagnostics and therapeutics in medical care reflect the scientific community's evolving understanding of disease states and their clinical implications. Marketable and valuable innovations are generally patented for protection of intellectual property. Here, we explore the landscape of cardiology-related patents in the United States.

All United States patents granted between 2005 and 2020 were included in this study. Keywords filtering was used to identify patents related to cardiovascular medicine. Statistical inference was conducted with the Mann-Kendall trend and analysis of variance tests. The results in this report are entirely reproducible with Python and R scripts available in a publicly accessible repository.

Of the 4,453,733 patents issued by the USPTO between 2005 and 2020, 31,048 (0.7%) were identified as cardiology-related patents. We identified the top 10 institutions within the for-profit and not-for-profit categories that were assigned the most cardiology-related patents in this time period. Distributions of number of patents per inventor were heavily right-skewed, with a small number of inventors responsible for a large number of patents each. Patents in the cardiac imaging subgroup took the longest to gain approval after submission (median delay: 3.6 years).

By studying the patent universe, we are able to identify underexplored areas within cardiovascular medicine. Obstacles such as long delays between patent application and approval can hamper innovation within a field. As a next step, we aim to use these results to predict the next area within cardiovascular medicine to undergo explosive research and innovation.