Team:Brasil-USP/Practices/Patent
Patent
Why are we applying a patent?
Protecting our technology is extremely important to enrich our startup value and attract stakeholders. A patent will ensure that our innovative technology remains competitive in the market comparing to current uses of waste tires. The innovation developed by our team is fully-patentable, once these types of enzymes have never been used in this combination.
What can be patented in biotechnology area?
As we established to turn our idea into a startup, numerous questions about how to protect our invention emerged. In this sense, we researched about patentable materials and the main differences between countries1
The United States has a complete patent system, in which you can protect almost anything. Unfortunately, in our country - Brazil - the situation is quite different, as can be seen in Table 1. Analyzing theses differences, and having in mind that our startup will be placed in Brazil, we planned the approach in our project’s protection.
What are we protecting?
As was shown on the previous section, Brazil grants only a few types of patents. In this scope, our team decided to develop different patents for each step of the project, which are showed in detail below. For example, in our country it is not allowed to protect a wild type microorganism, then, in the devulcanization process we will be protecting the optimization parameters in industrial scale.
How are we protecting?
Our strategy about the intellectual property protection was decided with the assistance of USP Innovationn Agency, a part of the university designated to assist its faculty and students mainly in patent deposits. They informed us that the brazilian government allows a grace period after the first publication of the research. In this sense, a simple publication of the description of the project on the wiki would be sufficient for us to partially protect our intellectual property temporarily. Additionally, they informed us that part of each of the patents proposed will be owned by USP. This happens because, as students of the University, we are human resources of the institution, and therefore, all the research developed by us also belongs to them - and we are considered inventors, not patent direct holders. Another aspect that confirms their ownership on the patents is that we developed all the project in USP laboratories. With that in mind, our startup will license this patent and hopefully develop new technologies in the future as a partner of USP. All the details of how we decided the patent is in this link.
As stated before, our technology is innovative and fully-patentable. In order to understand the importance of our project we searched for similar patents along with Braskem. Table 2 shows the patents deposited all around the world related to our project, and here we state the differences between their idea and ours. Using the keywords Rubber Oxigenase and triisoprene no results were obtained. For polyisoprene degradation and rubber degradation we have got the following results.
References
1. http://www.inpi.gov.br/; Acessed on 09/12/2015.