A few ingredients, mostly natural, have a long history of use for mental health benefits. Ingredients such as Ginkgo biloba, Curcumin, and Bacopa monnieri have been used for thousands of years in a variety of applications related to mental health, memory, and mood.
Tool for representation of combination of Actives
Natural Product Research
With all types of herbal and natural ingredients present with effective health benefit, combinations of ingredients (dietary fiber) become crucial for developing strategies for improved health plan to determine which may best enhance or provide wide spectrum/ of health benefit. Combination result in synergy as the combined effect is larger than the additive effect of each individual ingredient. With so many products and formulations coming onto the market, patenting has now become part of any brand’s strategy for many nutraceutical companies to protect extensive research and development efforts.
So, to get a Patent for any new combination one should be aware of all the herbal combinations which were already claimed/disclosed in patents and other references.
What are the challenges?
In the past several years, the dietary supplement space has seen an explosion of innovation. Thus, a combination may be patentable if the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, i.e., if the characteristics are “materially different” and not cumulative of the characteristics of the individual ingredients and where a new combination of known ingredients provides a previously unknown synergistic effect, then the combination is patentable. Synergy is notoriously difficult to study in a rigorous fashion.
Similarly, to identify blends that improve mood, attention, and working memory safely, there is a need to standardize and extend the study of cognition modulating substances. Many of the ingredients reported as mixtures, compositions, and dietary supplements in patents and NPLs are well known.
Here are certain challenges listed below that arrives while searching for a novel combination.
Case study- combination of natural ingredient for cognition
A few ingredients, mostly natural, have a long history of use for mental health benefits. Ingredients such as Ginkgo biloba, Curcumin, and Bacopa monnieri have been used for thousands of years in a variety of applications related to mental health, memory, and mood.
The past few years have seen a renewed interest in the use of various ingredients claimed to have cognitive benefits individually or in combination, studied across the world. We have done a sample study with these 17 ingredients. We have outlined our approach below to overcome all the challenges while performing the searches and providing the output of a combination study.
MCRPL’S Ideal methodology
Synonyms or keywords for all 17 ingredients were collected. Search strategies were devised for individual ingredients and the patent sets for all the individual ingredients were retrieved by performing searches in patent database
From the retrieved 17 ingredients result hits, patents disclosing more than 1 ingredient were Filtered using MC’s proprietary in-house tool (Common patents across the individual result sets).
Short listed patent documents were manually analysed to shortlist the combination patents and capture all combination details, health benefit details disclosed in the shortlisted patents.
Using tool to generate a combination matrix from the shortlisted patents with heat map with varying colour intensities based on the no. of references disclosing the combinations
All 17 ingredient listed below:
- Alpha-Linoleic acid
- Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA)
- Huperzine A
- GABA (γ-Aminobutyric acid)
- Teacrine
- Folic acid
- Acetyl-L-Carnitine
- Bacopa
- Gingko
- Curcumin
- Taurine
- Pyridoxine
- Alpha-Lipoic acid
- Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)
- Phosphatidylserine
- Resveratrol
- Theanine
Data visualisation from vantage points
Combination matrix Tool Features
The combination matrix represents the 2-dimensional combination of ingredients of interest (two ingredient combination). x- and y-axes values contains the same ingredients list.
Each heat map segment in the matrix denoted by varying colour intensities represents the no. of references disclosing the combination between the two ingredients.
- White segments – Represents no reference has reported a combination involving the particular ingredients
- Grey or lighter shades – Represents the combinations involving the particular ingredients is reported in few references
- Darker coloured shades – Represents the combinations involving the particular ingredients is reported in more number of references and the intensity of the colour increases with the increasing number of references
On moving the Mouse over a particular colour segment will provide the information about no. of patent references disclosing the particular combination.
On clicking the particular heat map segment, a pop-up provides you the list of all patent numbers (hyperlinked to espacenet) disclosing the particular combination
Conclusion
The fusion of ingredients identified through patent data represented in the form of heat-sheet matrix form will have the potential to develop recommendations, address research gaps, and certain other trends which are needed to reinforce the evidence and arrive at informed decisions.
For any of your combination study needs involving actives even more than hundreds please contact us and our search team can perform the searches and provide the output in the combination matrix tool.
