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Reporting from the 2013 Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) Northeast (NE) Conference

Reporting from the 2013 Patent Information Users Group (PIUG) Northeast (NE) Conference

The 2013 PIUG Northeast (NE) Conference was held last Tuesday (October 1st) at The Heldrich Hotel in New Brunswick, NJ. More than 100 patent information professionals gathered to hear nine excellent talks, and interact with more than 10 sponsoring organizations who exhibited, and provided workshops before, and after the Conference. The Conference overview page provided the following description of the meeting:

The PIUG Northeast Conference brings together experts in the areas of chemistry, biology, other sciences, engineering, and legal topics relating to patent information. It is an excellent forum to learn and share best practices regarding a specific process in searching and retrieving patent information. Vendors will be available to discuss their expertise and products. The key objective of this meeting is to provide opportunities for learning, networking and professional development.

The Co-Chairs of the Planning Committee were Shelly Pavlek and Kimberly Miller, and the Chair of the Program Committee was Lucy Akers. The list of all the volunteers can be found at the bottom of the overview page and everyone involved, especially Shelly, Kim and Lucy should be congratulated on a fantastic event. The talks were excellent, and the facilities provided for a comfortable and professional environment for networking, and interaction among the participants. All and all it was a tremendous event that reflected extremely well on PIUG.

I was honored to provide one of the presentations during the meeting and a link to my slides from SlideShare is below:


Thanks to Sandra Unger, there is also video available from my talk which was posted to YouTube:


I have started a Patinformatics Channel on YouTube and began collecting videos that I think will be of interest to participants in the patent analysis community. Please subscribe to the channel if you would like to see more patent analysis videos as they are collected or posted.

The remainder of this post provides the titles of each of the other presentations along with the Tweets associated with them that were collected during the meeting. I had to leave after the afternoon break, so there are no Tweets for the final three talks but the abstracts from those presentations are provided. Copies of all the presentations are provided for PIUG members at the following link. Getting access to these excellent presentations is a major benefit of PIUG membership and interested individuals can get additional information on joining PIUG here.

At the end of the post there are also Tweets from the five-minute sponsor presentations.

List of Presentations

Implications of the Myriad Supreme Court Decision — Human Genes Are Not Patentable, But What About Everything Else?

Paul Golian (Bristol-Myers Squibb)

@atripper 1 Oct

Golian – Watch out for Markush claims which might embody a naturally occurring substance, entire claim could be knocked out #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Golian – Funk Brothers Supreme Court case was the major precedent used to decide the merits in the Myriad case #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Golian – CAFC held that only Dr. Harry Ostrer (NYU) had standing to bring suit against Myriad out of 18 plaintiffs #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Golian – Myriad was started as a spin off of Skolnick’s research at the Univ of Utah on BRCA1 #PIUGNE2013

Crossing the Line: Is It a Drug or a Device?

Kristine H. Atkinson (A/A Patent Investigations)

@atripper 1 Oct

Atkinson – More careful attention to subject matter may result in a myriad of functional claims in the future #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Atkinson – Thinking about drug delivery especially in regards to recent Myriad decision important 4 patenting purposes #PIUGNE2013

Drug Formulations

James L. Grant (Novartis Inc.)

@atripper 1 Oct

Grant – suggested use of claim charts as a means for identifying which components of a complex formulation are present #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Grant – need to make certain that you have freedom-to-operate with the matrix in which you put a new drug #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Grant – A drawing of materials associated with drug tablet can help define scope of search associated with formulation #PIUGNE2013

China Utility Model Patent: Trash or Treasure? A citation based analysis

Binqiang Liu (State Intellectual Property Office of China)

@PIUG 1 Oct

Dr Binqiang Liu great talk on “China Utility Model Patents: Trash or Treasure? ” Conclusion: definitely treasure! #piugne2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Liu – Chinese Utility Models cover shape/structure/combination of a device or production but not the function #PIUGNE2013

Citation searching; Getting the big picture

Donald Walter (Thomson Reuters)

@atripper 1 Oct

Walter – no significant difference between US citations for blockbuster drugs versus control cases #PIUGNE2013

Suggestion by D. Walter – but there IS a significant difference between family-to-family citations, as measured by the Derwent Patent Citation Index (DPCI)

@atripper 1 Oct

Walter – patent maintenance and family member size can be important considerations, in addition to forward citations #PIUGNE2013

Case Study: Avoiding the Black Box in Patent Analysis

Melissa Burt (Questel-Orbit Inc.)

As the demand for both meso-level and macro-level patent analysis continues to increase, the complexity of worldwide patent information makes it difficult to apply generic visualization tools and methods. Patent Information professionals are uniquely positioned to create, interpret and tweak patent-based visualizations. Specifically, using a command-line search based axis within the visualizations allows you to be as precise in your project deliverables as in your searches. Further customization can be implemented by being in control of data normalization.

Having flexible, integrated search and analysis capabilities is vital; a case for avoiding a visualization black box is presented. Other data-centric analytical functions will be addressed.

When was that first available online? Understanding the importance of ahead-of-print coverage in STN’s non-patent literature databases for prior art searching

Brian Sweet (Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS))

Many leading bibliographic databases on STN now provide access to ahead-of-print content. While the extra timeliness is welcome, the abundance of dates associated with these documents can make it difficult to answer patent searching’s million dollar question: When was that first available online? This talk will explore ahead-of-print content in CAplus SM, Embase™/Embase Alert and MEDLINE®, and show how to determine when records in those databases first became available online.

Finding better patents faster – combining the expertise of patent examiners to help find prior art and similar patents

Mike Lloyd (Griffith Hack/Ambercite)

Patent searching is mainly done by searching for patents with targeted keywords or patent codes, or a combination of the two, but there are limitations with both of these approaches. Keywords and patents codes can be overly broad and yet still miss relevant prior art. These search processes can be time consuming, and USPTO and Federal court invalidation data suggest that both approaches are imperfect.

Another method increasingly used to search for patents that are citationally linked to known patents of interest. However, users can be overwhelmed with hundreds of citation connections, and it is still necessary to determine which citation connections are most relevant to the user’s objective.

Network patent searching is the process of agglomerating all of the citations in an area (thereby combining the search expertise of examiners) to identify the most similar and influential patents in relation to a patent of interest. It can work remarkably well in practice, saving searchers hours of time, while identifying highly relevant documents missed by conventional techniques. This presentation will provide case studies using the graphical network patent search tool AmberScope.

Tweets from Followers Not in Attendance

Peter Cowan @noremacc 18h

I will live vicariously through you –> “@atripper: Attending and speaking at the PIUG NE Conference today. Tweeting at #PIUGNE2013”

Kristin Whitman @IPLibrarian 1 Oct

@atripper would love more abt Markush in the Cloud but can’t find press etc. on ChemAxon website -maybe this is new rollout at #PIUGNE2013 ?

Tweets on Sponsor Showcase Presentations

@atripper 1 Oct

Thomson Reuters – Markush in the Cloud using Instant JChem is now available for early adopters #PIUGNE2013

Retweeted by Kristin Whitman

@atripper 1 Oct

Thomson Reuters – Thomson Data Analyzer was recently enhanced with additional family citations and clean-up capabilities #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

STN – Classic STN will be supported while New STN platform is being developed as a multi-year effort #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Questel – Many new data and visualization enhancements available through the http://Orbit.com  platform #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

BizInt – Producing a cookbook of reports & visualizations with step by step instructions 4 producing them with their tool #PIUGNE2013

Retweeted by Kenichi Yamamura

@atripper 1 Oct

TPR has enhanced its support in Asia including CN, JP, KR, SG and others #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Search Technology – VantagePoint reached version 8 with Parent & Child fields, Bubble Charts and enhanced Super Profile #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Minesoft – introducing a new analytics module which will allow users to work with up to 100,000 families #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Minesoft – PatBase celebrating its 10 year anniversary this year with new capabilities including a legal status timeline #PIUGNE2013

@atripper 1 Oct

Intellixir – Releasing version 9 including a one-click analysis tool which includes several pre-processing steps #PIUGNE2013

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