Welcome!
Do you work with patents? But, I thought you worked with biology, are you not a biologist?
And, so that when I answer that I do work with patents and with biology, I feel like as if a question mark were forming over people´s faces... How so?
It´s interesting that whenever people think over patents, in technology, they usually think about electricity, electronics, supersonic jets, cell phones, motors... rarely do they think on our everyday biology. And, however, biotechnology is, maybe, one of the oldest technologies, losing, perhaps, just for the wooden and stone tools. Because, since the ancient times, men use plants and animals to produce technology to help him over. Therefore, when we find out that a snake venom acts against hypertension, and we invent a drug using this protein as a base - and Capoten is exactly that, it was based on a protein isolated from the Brazilian pit viper Jararaca - that´s biotechnology!
Nevertheless, we don´t need a technology so up to date, we don´t. If we think on the Brazilian History, in the name Brazil itself, the Portuguese, when they went to Brazil, they were after gold. But, they did not find it immediately, because the gold was mainly inland, in the State of Minas Gerais (General Mines)... However, in the shore, they found out a tree, known as Pau-Brasil, whose heartwood could be used to dye tissues in a red color. Centuries later, they even isolated the specific molecule, named brasilin, which in the 1500´s was used as a dye. This is biotechnology! It´s to identify plants, animals and microorganisms properties and use them to solve everyday human problems.
A patent is a way of protecting these technological solutions. To work with biotechnology and patents is to work with these life-based inventions, that are originated in Nature. A vaccine made from an inactivated virus; a fungus that produces an antibiotic or that can be employed in brewery or bakery - the biological yeast is nothing more than a fungus, the Saccharomyces cerevisae, a kind of single-cell fungus called yeast. Cheese and yogurts are also made up from microorgansims. All that is biotechnology! That´s what I work with. And I love it!
The goal of this page is to share with those who wish to follow me, a little bit of what I´ve learned along all those years working with that. It´s to show that the Patent System is not a bogeyman: that it is nos as complicated as it seems. That is feasible, either patenting an invention of yours or perfecting an invention already made by others, or investing in technologies that are already in public domain. I hope I can!
Examples used herein will all be biology-based; but don´t get shy if biology is not your business: whichever I say about patents is also valid for any other technology.
Wish me luck!
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