Case Study: Japanese Prior Art Search

Time: Oct. 2009

Project duration: 3 weeks

Client: A major patent law firm in Europe

Search scope: to search Japanese patent and non-patent literature published before 1995 to invalidate a US patent.

Field: pharmaceutical / biotech.

Description: The target patent relates to a method of stabilizing a protein that is an active component for treating blood coagulation related diseases.

Database used in the search:
For Japanese patent: NRI, PATOLIS and IPDL;
For non-patent Japanese literature: JDream II (JSTPlus), JMEDPlus, READ, NINii, G-search, GENii, Kaken, and Japanese Internet search 

Japanese patent type searched:
Japanese patents, including granted patents, patents that are pending, and unexamined patent applications.

Search strategy:
After reviewing the target technology and associated composition , we believe full text key word string search is a more suitable search for this particular search task, therefore we formulated a search strategy using key word string combinations in a few different full text searches from different aspects .

Search results:
We searched full text of Japanese patent and non-patent literature documents using key word string combinations covering a very wide scope, and have reviewed about 478 patent hits and about 164 non-patent literature hits.

21 Japanese patent documents that disclose using non-protein stabilizing agents such as saccharides, amino acids, polyols etc. to stabilize the active component are uncovered.

In the non-patent literature searches, we found 2 reference documents that describe using sodium citrate and glycylglycine solution to stabilize the active component.