Profile of medicinal plants utilization through patent documents: the andiroba example

Today, one of the trends of the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and food market is the development of products with components of natural origin, rationally exploiting biodiversity. Brazilian population makes secular use of medicinal plants including andiroba, whose oil is used in folk medicine as febrifuge, pain-relieving, anti-parasitic, anti-allergic as well as insect repellant. The present study attempts to evaluate the profile of utilization of andiroba by analyzing the patenting trends based on information collected on the databases of the World Intellectual Property Organization, European Patent Office and Brazilian National Institute of Industrial Property in the period from 1990 to 2011. The following parameters were analyzed: chronological aspect of the applications, countries of priority, international patent classification, technologies and actors in the technological platform. The temporal analysis of the applications shows an evident increase despite a discontinuous evolution of the number of applications. Pharmaceutical, chemical and cosmetic areas were identified as the main areas for commercial application of the plant. Brazil is the country with the largest number of applications even though the majority of the patent technologies are already in public domain, indicating that the technological information contained in these documents could be used for research and investment in several areas.