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Ag Biotech Patents on the Move
David Schimmelpfennig
John King
Keith Weller, USDA
Innovation in agricultural biotechnology has recently flourished.
Since the late 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, a variety of
firms have secured key patents, from relatively small seed supply
companies and research-oriented agbiotech firms to large multinational
corporations. But beginning in the late 1990s, the larger companies
began acquiring the smaller ones. Mergers among several of the large
firms placed a majority of agbiotech patents in the hands of a dwindling
number of large, international corporations.
This concentration of patent ownership means that an increasing
share of future research will probably be done by companies with
the large scale necessary to handle technology development, product
marketing, and regulation compliance efficiently. But these companies
might restrict research to complement their existing products. Small
startup companies might still pursue innovative avenues of research,
but probably with an eye toward becoming acquisition targets or
benefiting from licensing revenue. Patents will play a key role
in either of these strategies.
A recent study analyzed changes in patent ownership of more than
3,000 agbiotech patents owned by a sample of U.S. and European companies.
Agricultural biotechnology patents issued between 1976 and 2000
were classified by their original patent holders and their 2002
owners. The study reveals that by 2002, fully 95 percent of patents
originally held by seed or small agbiotech firms had been acquired
by large chemical or multinational corporations.
Furthermore, none of the smaller firms acquired patents from the
larger ones, and none of the patents changed hands among the different
types of large firms. For instance, chemical companies retained
all 651 patents for which they were the original owners, but also
acquired 219 patents from agbiotech firms and 451 patents from seed
companies. With key patents being held by fewer companies, intellectual
property ownership will probably continue to affect agbiotech industry
structure and the pace and direction of future research.
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