Mapping the global patent landscape of phage therapy

Who patents phage therapy, where, and on which technologies: a global landscape from 1955 to 2023.

Line chart of patent families per application year for ten phage-therapy technology themes, rising sharply after 2010 — Patent families per year for the ten technology themes found by topic modelling, 1955–2023. Figure from Mbogning Fonkou & Kong, Nature Biotechnology (2024).

Line chart of patent families per year by IPC subclass, led by A61K, C12N and A61P — Patent families per year by IPC subclass; A61K, C12N and A61P lead. Figure from Mbogning Fonkou & Kong, Nature Biotechnology (2024).

Problem

Phage therapy is a fast-growing alternative to antibiotics, but nobody had mapped who patents it, where, and on what.

Approach

Collected 5,753 patents, merged them into 2,365 patent families, found 10 technology themes with topic modelling, and measured applicant and inventor impact in Python.

Result

First-author article in Nature Biotechnology (December 2024), with all code public.

My role

First author: study design, patent collection and cleaning, NLP, network analysis and writing.

Outputs

2,365 patent families; figures, networks, topic models; Nature Biotechnology article

Methods and tools

Lens.org
Python
pandas
scikit-learn
NLTK
scispaCy
OpenRefine
LDA
VOSviewer

Skills

Patent analytics
entity normalization
topic modelling
network analysis
writing