Australasian Biotechnology (backfiles) AusBiotech ISSN: 1036-7128 Vol. 10, Num. 3, 2000, pp. 12-13

Australasian Biotechnology, Vol. 10 No. 3, 2000, pp. 12-13

Ros Stirling

Code Number: au00029

Biotechnology has been identified as Australia’s primary area of scientific excellence in a major study of the link between Australian patenting and basic science.

The study, commissioned jointly by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the CSIRO, was conducted by Dr Francis Narin of CHI Research Inc in the United States and analysed Australian technology trends reflected in Australian-invented US patents for the period 1979 to 1998.

Overall, the report found Australian patented technology to be “rather old, rather slow, and driven more by the country’s primary resources than by technology.”

However, Australian biotechnology patents had increased by 249% in the period 1994-98 from the level during 1989-93, compared with a 118% increase for all US patents.

Further, research in biomedical fields was a clear leader in terms of citations to Australian papers from US patents granted over the 1988-97 period, with biochemistry and molecular biology recording 1091 citations, general biomedical research 849 and immunology 638 citations. From here citation numbers fell to 251 for general and internal medical research, 232 for general chemistry and 208 for endocrinology research, with fields such as physics, engineering and technology and biology producing still fewer cited papers.

The report concluded that the figures provided “a strong argument for the support of fundamental biomedical research”.

The report has has resulted in plans by the ARC and CSIRO to consider the joint development of strategic technology clusters aimed at developing patent portfolios in targeted technology areas.

In their foreword to the report, ARC Chair, Professor Vicki Sara, and Acting CEO of CSIRO, Dr Colin Adam, warned that the study indicated weaknesses in Australian technology.

“Australian patenting activity falls below our expectations based on our nation’s GDP, and our performance in leading-edge technology areas is patchy.”

However, the study found that Australian patenting was highly science-linked, with 90% of the scientific research papers cited in Australian-invented U.S. patents issued to private companies authored at publicly-funded organisations, either in Australia or elsewhere. This compares with 73% in the US.

Professor Sara and Dr Adam concluded that the report demonstrated that the ARC and CSIRO, along with the National Health & Medical Research Council and other Government agencies, played important roles in supporting high quality R&D activities in Australia and that the Australian Government’s investment in research underpinned much of the patenting activity documented in Australia.

The report itself described Australia’s performance on the world scene of rapidly advancing, research-based technology as “fair to middling, with clear strength in Australian biotechnology, and strong linkages between Australian patents and publicly sponsored scientific research.”

It found that Australian-invented patenting in the U.S. patent system has been growing ‘rather slowly’, from about 0.45 per cent of all U.S. patents in 1979 to 0.50 per cent in 1997.

“In 1980, Australian inventors (270 patents) were well ahead of Israel (116 patents), Finland (122 patents) and Taiwan (69 patents).

“By 1998, however, Israel (755 patents) had passed Australia (722 patents) and Finland (599 patents) had just about caught up.

“Moreover, Taiwan had had a remarkable rise, from being the least active of the 11 countries analysed to being fourth most active with 3,110 U.S. patents, passing Finland, Israel, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Canada, and rapidly approaching the United Kingdom (3,506 patents).”

The paper warned that “holding steady in the technology competition may not be enough to maintain Australia’s technological position in the world.”

Figures for the Current Impact Index, which measures the technical impact of a country’s technology by how often patents of the past five years are cited in world patents in the current year, showed Australia next to the last among all the countries assessed, behind the Netherlands and just ahead of Finland.

“This says that Australian patents, overall, are not having a wide impact on world patents, largely because many of them are concentrated in the mechanical and manufacturing technologies and very few are in electronics. Biotechnology, an area of excellence and emphasis for Australia, is a small part of the overall U.S. patent system - only two per cent - and its contribution to the overall index for Australia is therefore lost in the broad impact data.”

Another set of indicators showed the Technology Cycle Time - the median age of earlier patents cited as prior art on US patents. This showed that Australia was the slowest of all the countries listed, again reflecting the preponderance of older, mechanical and manufacturing technologies in Australian patenting.

“Taiwan is by far the most rapid, because of the heavy emphasis that country places on the rapidly changing areas of semiconductor technology. Canada and Australia, which show similar patterns of resource-based and biotech-intensive patenting, have similar cycle times.”

On a more positive note, Australian- invented US patents had a relatively high level of science linkage - a measure based on the average number of scientific research papers cited on the front pages of a set of patents.

“The only countries with more highly science-linked patents are Israel, the U.S. and Canada. Australia is increasing in science linkage and has now passed the U.K. and most of the other countries. This reflects the emphasis that Australian inventions place on life sciences and biotechnology, and the fact that those patents are strongly linked to basic scientific research.”

In terms of the number of US patents assigned, Australia was ranked `below average’ with a patent count of about 800.

“To become ‘average’, Australia would need to be assigned 1,348 patents. The deficit of 548 patents appears to be associated largely with the lack of semiconductor and related electronic patenting in Australia.”

Of the total patents, 59% were obtained by private companies, 5% by universities, 4% by CSIRO, 3% by other government organisations, and the remainder by individual inventors.

The paper concluded that public science played a major role in supporting the strongest areas of Australian technology, and Australia had the potential to play a significant role biotechnology and in related science-linked areas of modern technology.

However, two areas of concern were the dominance of older, less science-linked areas of technology, and lack of visibility of Australian science to the rest of the world.

The report, Inventing Our Future: the link between Australian patenting and basic science, can be downloaded from the Internet at www.arc.gov.au/publications.

• Ros Stirling is the Editor of Australian R&D Review and can be contacted on tel (03) 9521 0269.

Copyright 2000 - Australasian Biotechnology