Brazilian PTO shares data from the plan to combat the patent backlog by technological area.

The BRPTO’s plan to combat the backlog is clearly working, but we still have important differences in the prosecution length depending on the application’s technological area.

If we analyze the extremes, we have applications involving polymers with a prosecution of 2.1 years from the examination request and, at the opposite extreme, telecommunication cases, in which the PTO takes almost 5 years after the examination request to reach a first instance decision.

Another important  datum published by the PTO is the number of Opinions / Office Actions published by technological area. While cases in the area of civil engineering have an average of 1.43 OA, Biotech cases have an average of 2.3 OA.

On average, Biopharmaceutical / Biotech and telecom cases filed in 2016* are now being decided, while cases from 2019 in the areas of engineering, electricity, cosmetics, agrochemicals, textiles and others are already reaching the end of examination.

*It is important to remember that the exam queues are now organized by the date the exam was requested, and no longer by the filing date of the application.

Therefore, there are important gaps within the PTO’s examination divisions that need to be dealt with so that we have more uniformity between technological areas in the results of the combat plan.

Check out the graphs below for detailed information.

Author: Daniela Fasoli