Open Innovation or Traditional Patenting Strategies to Efficiently Address Health Emergencies? How Patent Information Was Used Towards Effective Treatments for COVID-19.

Introduction/objective: During the 1150 days of COVID-19 pandemic there were great efforts to develop efficient treatments for the disease. After this long time, some drugs emerged as treatment for COVID-19. Some of them are new drugs, most of them, known drugs. These developments were triggered by information already available in patent documents. Pharmaceutical companies, therefore, rushed to conduct drugs evaluations and trials in order to deliver to the world a reasonable treatment that could reach the majority of its population. However, it is not immediately clear how companies operated to reach their goals. The ability of open innovation to achieve results assertively and faster than closed innovation strategies is questioned and therefore, it is questioned whether pharmaceutical companies use open innovation to face COVID-19.

Methods: In this work, data available on patent databases were mined to inform about the scientific and technological panorama of selected drugs tested for COVID-19 treatment and to understand the perspectives of such developments during the pandemic.

Results: This study evidenced that most treatments were based on known drugs, that some of the initially promising drugs were abandoned during the pandemic, and that it was able to inform if open innovation and collaborations were explored strategies.

Conclusion: This study evidenced that the developments during COVID-19 were not based on open innovation by revealing a patent race towards the treatment development, but with practically no collaborations or information exchange between companies, universities, and research facilities.