A Petrochemicals and plastics company, commissioned SciTech Patent Art for a patentability search related to the incorporation of certain modified polymers in the preparation of organic optical devices. A significant portion of prior art was expected to be in JP/CN language which was a challenge due to searching of machine translated text.
Problem & Context:
SciTech Patent Art Approach & Deliverables:
- An organic chemist was assigned the job. Structure search for the modified polymers in Registry, MARPAT and DWPI did not provide any result.
- Keyword search for related polymers, however, provided many JP and CN references, all of which were describing only the base polymer or different modifications of the base polymer.
- It was observed that a particular inventor from a Chinese University had many related patents.
- A search for patents and non-patent literature was conducted in Chemical Abstracts and other databases using the inventor’s name.
- Two documents (a patent and a journal article) were found that disclosed the same modified polymer generically and having application in organic optical devices. These references were not retrieved in previous searches due to poor machine translation in databases and the modified polymer was also not indexed in Chemical Abstracts/DWPI.
- The client responded saying that they were not aware of the references found by SPA and that they were indeed very critical.
The patentability search report was provided within a week for $1,500