PDF, Patent Landscape Report on Atazanavir - WIPO

SECTION 7: SPECIFIC ELEMENTS OF DEVELOPMENTFOUNDER COMPOSITIONSThe founder composition for Atazanavir, invented at Novartis (then Ciba-Geigy) waspresented earlier as a citation map (Figure 10), but the map is repeated here showing bothforward and backward citations (Figure 29). The backward references represent earlier artreferenced by Novartis, and because the patent was issued, it implies that the compositionthat was later named Atazanavir was new compared to earlier art. The earlier art includeswork by Novartis, Abbott, Merck and Roche (Figure 30). The Roche document isparticularly interesting. The map in Figure 31 is a forward citation map from the highlightedRoche patent, and it is extraordinarily highly cited, as well as being the founder case for aRoche protease inhibitor drug. As can be seen from the 3-generation citation map in Figure31, the Roche patent is far more highly cited than the Atazanavir document, and contains3950 citing documents published between 1990 and 2011. This high rate of citation isprobably because it was the ground-breaker for this class of drugs, showing in 1989 thatthe HIV-aspartyl protease target was amenable to inhibition that resulted in diseasemodulation. Looking for very highly and persistently cited documents such as the Rochepatent, and then analyzing their downstream references can allow insight into how the mostfoundational work in a field was followed up.Figure 29. Citation map of the founder composition patent for AtazanavirGame-ChangerProteaseInhibitor <strong>Patent</strong>Hoffmann La RocheFounderATZ<strong>Patent</strong>BackwardForward34