Relating patenting and peer-review publications: an extended perspective on the vascular health and risk management literature

PURPOSE This investigation identifies patent applications published under the international Patent Convention Treaty between July 2010 and January 2011 in three significant fields of vascular risk management (arterial hypertension, atherosclerosis, and aneurysms) and investigates whether the inventors have also published peer reviewed papers directly describing their claimed invention. RESULTS Out of only 48 patent documents that specifically addressed at least one of the above-mentioned fields, 15 had immediate companion papers of which 13 were published earlier than the corresponding patent applications; the majority of these papers were published by noncorporate patentees. Although the majority of patent applications (30 documents) had at least one corporate assignee, 18 came from academic environments. As expected, medical devices dominated in the aneurysm segment while pharmacology dominated hypertension and atherosclerosis. CONCLUSION Although information related to hypertension, atherosclerosis, or aneurysms that was claimed in international patent applications reached the public quicker through the corresponding peer review document if one was published, more than two-thirds of the patent applications had no such companion paper in a scientific journal. The patent literature, which is freely available online as full text, offers information to scientists and developers in the fields of vascular risk management that is not available from the peer reviewed literature.