Team:Brasil-USP/Entrepreneurship/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.
