CSIR ranked first in number of medical biotechnology patents in the country

New Delhi, November 13, 2021:

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is ranked as the first in the country in terms of number of medical biotechnology patents, followed by Hindustan Lever and Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

No Indian organisation ranked close to the top 25 global entities in terms of output in the field, according to a report on Research Landscape and Performance Benchmarking in Biotechnology, a study commissioned by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Ministry of Science and Technology, and conducted by Elsevier.

The CSIR ranked first in the country with 333 patent families, Hindustan Lever ranked second with 99 patent families, followed by the Department of Biotechnology, with 90 patent families in medical biotechnology. Biocon with 61 patent families, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories with 56, Eli Lilly with 47, Unilever with 46 and the Indian Institute of Technology with 46 patent families are the other major players in the medical biotechnology patenting in the country.

A patent family is a collection of patent applications covering the same or similar technical content.

Cadila Healthcare Ltd has 42 patent families, Avesthagen has 38 and Sun Pharmaceutical and Lupin have 38 and 35 patent families respectively. The other major firms which have more than 20 patent families include Panacea Biotech Ltd (35), Piramal Enterprises Ltd (33), Reliance Life Sciences Pvt Ltd (32), Wockhardt Ltd (31), National Institute of Immunology (30), Serum Institute of India (27), Bharat Biotech International (27) and Indian Institute of Science (26).

Globally, the medical biotechnology segment is much less dominated by organisations from Asia, with multiple US universities taking their share in the top spots. However, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranked first with 3,512 patent families, almost 800 more than the University of California System in second place with 2,711 patent families, Shanghai Bode Gene Development third with 2,519 patent families applied between 1999 and 2002 followed by F.Hoffmann-La-Roche (2,396), GlaxoSmithKline (2,052), Novartis (2,023), Bayer Healthcare (1,991), Sanofi (1,933), US HHS (1,611) and CNRS (1,572).

In terms of research publications, globally, India ranks fourth based on the number of biotechnology publications, after the United States, China and Japan. Across agricultural, environmental, industrial and medical biotechnology, during the period between 1999 and 2018, India produced 38,595 of the 5,02,336 global biotechnology publications, accounting for 7.7 per cent of the global scholarly output over the period. India’s contribution to the field has been growing overtime; its annual growth rate of publications was 10.6 per cent, which is faster than the 6.4 per cent overall rate for the field. India’s growth was not only in terms of publications, but also citation impact and international collaboration.

Global research publications have grown from 11,611 publications in 1999 to 38,040 in 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of 6.4 per cent. This represents faster growth than the rate for total research output, which was 5.1 per cent over the period. There is an acceleration in publication growth in the second half of the decade.

The proportion of biotechnology publications globally, belonging to medical biotechnology accounts for most biotechnology publications and has been increasing over time, from around one third (35.6 per cent) of biotechnology publications in 1999 to nearly half (46.8 per cent) of all biotechnology publications in 2018, it said.

Institutes such as University of Delhi, the Banaras Hindu University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, which each published more than or close to 700 biotechnology publications in the 1999-2018 period. In terms of biotechnology sub fields, relative to the global distribution of publications, India appears to specialise in agricultural biotechnology preferentially with a subject share well above the global average. However, India’s publications in this sub field remain limited at around five per cent of India’s biotechnology publications and tend to present relatively low levels of citation impact and excellence, in line with global trends for the sub field. PharmaBiz