Patent owners 7

In the area of adjuvant technology, the overwhelming majority of assignees – owners of inventions written up in patents – are corporations.  For the 653 patent families retrieved, all non-inventor assignees were determined and corporate mergers taken into account.  For example, Corixa Corporation, which was assignee in 7 families, was acquired in 2005 by GlaxoSmithKline; thus, for this analysis those 7 families were combined with those of GlaxoSmithKline.  The total number of assignees for the 653 patent families was about 1000.  The assignees that have 5 or more patent families as assignee are in the table below.  Together they own about 40% of all patent families found in the search.  GlaxoSmithKline has the largest share – 3% of the total number of families and 15% of the share owned by the top 28 assignees.

If only the first-listed assignee is looked at, the same assignees appear as owner of 209 patent families, indicating that at least 46 of 255 patent families are co-owned with a different entity.  GlaxoSmithKline is still the assignee of the highest number of patent families however.