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Engineering Biology in Cambridge

 

The SynBio Hub platform will allow the scientific community to monitor, review and discover the latest developments in synthetic biology Intellectual Property (IP). The open source platform will initially track all IP being published via the US patent office (USPTO) for relevance to synthetic biology.

Who we are

Ben Pellegrini, ex CTO of CambridgeIP, responsible for online patent search platform with over 100 million scientific documents.

Dr John Liddicoat, Philomathia Post Doctoral Fellow in Intellectual Property Law and Genomics, Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, Faculty of Law

Dr Ben Tregenna, PhD in Quantum Computing at Imperial, early member of Autonomy with specialist skills in Information Retrieval (IR), data search and indexing systems.

Dr Peter Murray-Rust, Emeritus Reader at the Department of Chemistry and Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, Founder of ContentMine a project providing open source software and training for text and data mining.

The idea

The SynBio Hub platform will allow the scientific community to monitor, review and discover the latest developments in synthetic biology Intellectual Property (IP). The open source platform will initially track all IP being published via the Us patent office (USPTO), currently the USPTO makes available all patent applications and granted patents as a weekly dump of around 14000 documents. Although the data is freely accessible it is hard to manage and view unless you have access to premium services and tools that can present this information more easily. Being able to monitor the stream of patent data will give a valuable resource to the synthetic biology community, allowing access to both detailed scientific information relating to inventions and detailed information on key players in the space, both inventors and companies, that can be useful in identifying collaboration opportunities. The platform will also allow for users to tune and edit their areas of interest allowing more relevant data ‘streams’ to be created and shared eg new genome editing techniques, applications featuring particular DNA ‘parts’.

It is hoped that should the project be successful we could then develop the project further to include other sources of patent eg EPO (European Patent Office), WIPO ( World Intellectual Property Organisation) and non patent literature sources eg CrossRef, PubMed etc using ContentMine tools. Historic data could also be loaded into the system, giving a much more holistic view of the state of IP within domain of synthetic biology, however this would significantly increase the technical challenges for the system as the volume of data increases. We are proactively seeking funding and having a prototype would be beneficial.

Full application.

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