Using design database structures to characterize freedom-to-operate in a design space: A legal case study

Novelty, and specifically freedom-to-operate (FTO), assessment is crucial step in launching and patenting a new product. We compare a traditional FTO analysis performed by a patent lawyer and expert in chemistry and pharmaceutical technology with the outcomes of a computational method. The computational method discovers the structural form of a set of patents using a text-derived similarity data, creating a descriptive space of the potentially relevant prior art. A test formulation of a fabricated new pharmaceutical drug was developed for the FTO and computational analysis, and strengths and areas for improvement of the computational method were identified. FTO analysis is time consuming and labor intensive, and results indicated that with further development, the computational method could aid patent lawyers in getting a faster and fresh snapshot of the space of prior art, and even point to patents most relevant to a proposed new product. Areas for improvement are intrinsic knowledge of the computational method in the field of application, and finding which sections of patents lead to most accurate representations of the space, and further automation and efficiency.

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