WIPS global: [International IP Briefing] COVID-19, KR

COVID-19

US Forbes reported, Corona Vaccine R&D funding scale and company rankings.

On May 6, 2021, Forbes, the US publishing and media company, reported the size and recipient company ranking of the ‘COVID-19 R&D Funding’, which was announced by the Global Health Center at the Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland.

According to this report, the countries with the largest fund in R&D of the COVID-19 vaccine were the US and Germany, respectively, investing about $2 billion and about $1.5 billion. It was confirmed that 98.12% of the approximately $5.9 billion (estimated) investment made by March 2021 was public funds.

This R&D fund was found to be mainly used by private companies and academia, and after public funds, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) accounted for 22% of the total investment. Since it comes from the public sectors (97.18%), almost all investment support can be said to be public funds.

R&D investment for the COVID-19 vaccine is concentrated in high-income countries. Western European countries, the United States and Canada have received the most of the funding.

As of March 2021, the ranking of the companies that received R&D funding for the COVID-19 vaccine are Moderna in 1^st with US$956.3 million, Janssen in 2^nd with US$910.6m, and Pfizer /BioNTech in 3^rd with $833 million, followed by CureVac, the fourth place, with $741.7 million.

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On May 10, 2021, the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) announced that Korea was ranked first for the declared Standard Essential Patent (declared SEP) which reported to the three International Organization for Standardization (ISO, IEC, ITU)؂1) in the world by 2020.

Standard Essential Patent (SEP) refers to a patent that must be used to produce and sell products that use standard technologies such as LTE, 5G communication (5G), WiFi, Bluetooth, MP3, etc.

However, it does not become a standard patent just by declaring it as a standard patent to a standardization organization.

Declared standard patent can be recognized as an actual standard patent only when it is confirmed that it conforms to the standard through verification of the necessity to determine whether it is consistent with the standard in the process of joining the standard patent pool or a patent litigation.

In 2020, Korea ranked first in the world with 3,344 cases (23.5%), an increase of about 6.4 times compared to 519 cases in 2016 (5th in the world), followed by the United States with 2,793 cases (19.6%), followed by Finland with 2,579 cases (18.1%) in 3rd place, and Japan in 4th with 1,939 cases (13.6%), and France in 5th place with 1,283 cases (9.0%).

By institutions that have declared standard patents reported to the three International Organization for Standardization, Samsung Electronics (Korea) ranked first with 2,799 cases, followed by Nokia (Finland) with 2,559 cases, and Thompson Licensing (France) with 907 cases in 3^rd place, Apple (USA) ranked 4th with 350 cases, and Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (Korea) ranked 5th with 251 cases.

The reason for the rapid increase in the number of declared standard patents reported to the three major International Organization for Standardization in 2020 is that in the second half of 2020, Samsung Electronics intensively declared about 2,500 video codec related patents in ISO/IEC JTC1.

Until now, the government has been striving to secure competitiveness in standard patents by linking R&D-standards-patents, such as fostering specialized patent agencies through mutual linkages with the Ministry of Science and ICT's and its 'Information Communication and Broadcasting Standard Development Support Project', ''National Standard Technology Enhancement Project” of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (Korean Agency for Technology and Standards)and KIPO's 'Standard Patent Creation Support Project'.