Critical Technology

Genomics & Biological Data

The capacity to read and hold biology at national scale: sequencing, genomic analysis and the biological datasets that are becoming strategic assets in their own right. One of the capabilities of Biotechnology & Health Technologies.

International families: 40k2015 to 2024
Leading country: United States3.3× the next
All families: 144khome filings included
Over five years: Rising2020 to 2024 against the five before

Year by year

Patent families by country of origin and the year of the earliest filing, 2000 to 2025; 2025 is a part year, still filling in. International families are those for which protection was sought beyond one country.

Volume

International patent families in the capability, by the year of the earliest filing.

Source: Global Institute for National Capability (GINC), 2026. Underlying patents from 107 patent offices, IFI CLAIMS and Google

Share by country

Each country's share of the year's international families, in per cent: the capability's five largest countries of origin, 2015 to 2024, and the rest of the world.

Source: Global Institute for National Capability (GINC), 2026. Underlying patents from 107 patent offices, IFI CLAIMS and Google

Country leaderboard

International patent families, 2015 to 2024, by country of origin. Growth compares the latest five full years with the five before.

Ten largest

United States

China

Japan

South Korea

Germany

United Kingdom

France

Switzerland

Netherlands

Canada

17,818

5,444

3,003

2,851

1,616

1,376

1,081

809

605

592


1	United States	17,818	44.8%	1.1×	22,138
2	China	5,444	13.7%	2.3×	92,611
3	Japan	3,003	7.5%	0.9×	5,085
4	South Korea	2,851	7.2%	1.4×	10,200
5	Germany	1,616	4.1%	1.1×	1,770
6	United Kingdom	1,376	3.5%	1.0×	1,518
7	France	1,081	2.7%	1.0×	1,160
8	Switzerland	809	2.0%	1.0×	886
9	Netherlands	605	1.5%	1.1×	743
10	Canada	592	1.5%	0.8×	701
11	Israel	459	1.2%	1.3×	490
12	Taiwan	438	1.1%	1.0×	838
13	Spain	438	1.1%	1.2×	513
14	Singapore	358	0.9%	1.3×	380
15	Australia	350	0.9%	0.9×	384
16	Belgium	308	0.8%	1.0×	331
17	Italy	255	0.6%	1.2×	322
18	Sweden	254	0.6%	1.5×	264
19	India	230	0.6%	1.2×	300
20	Denmark	157	0.4%	0.9×	168
21	Türkiye	114	0.3%	2.5×	179
22	Austria	103	0.3%	0.9×	107
23	Poland	102	0.3%	1.4×	343
24	Norway	86	0.2%	0.9×	92
25	Ireland	72	0.2%	1.5×	91
26	Finland	66	0.2%	1.3×	73
27	Russia	66	0.2%	0.6×	899
28	Hong Kong	61	0.2%	2.4×	90
29	Brazil	59	0.1%	1.5×	200
30	Cayman Islands	52	0.1%	0.2×	55
31	Portugal	50	0.1%	1.9×	62
32	New Zealand	43	0.1%	0.7×	48
33	Saudi Arabia	35	0.1%	0.7×	61
34	Czechia	30	0.1%	1.7×	75
35	Hungary	28	0.1%	1.2×	40
36	Malaysia	22	0.1%	0.3×	63
37	Mexico	20	0.1%	0.8×	106
38	South Africa	15	0.0%	0.9×	16
39	Luxembourg	13	0.0%	0.4×	18

Applicants

The largest applicants by international patent families, 2015 to 2024: across the world, then within each of the five countries with the most families in Genomics & Biological Data. Names are as held in the source and are not consolidated across subsidiaries.

Global

39,800 international families

ILLUMINA INC · United States

UNIV CALIFORNIA · United States

PIONEER HI BRED INT · United States

HOFFMANN LA ROCHE · Switzerland

INST NAT SANTE RECH MED · France

UNIV LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR · United States

784

647

495

482

351

318

United States

17,818 international families

ILLUMINA INC

UNIV CALIFORNIA

PIONEER HI BRED INT

UNIV LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR

HARVARD COLLEGE

MASSACHUSETTS INST TECHNOLOGY

770

627

493

311

296

288

China

5,444 international families

BGI SHENZHEN

MGI TECH CO LTD

SHENZHEN BGI LIFE SCIENCE RES INSTITUTE

BOE TECHNOLOGY GROUP CO LTD

BGI SHENZHEN CO LTD

SHENZHEN INST OF ADV TECH CAS

267

186

155

104

Japan

3,003 international families

UNIV TOKYO

FUJIFILM CORP

HITACHI HIGH TECH CORP

SYSMEX CORP

SHIMADZU CORP

UNIV OSAKA

122

109

103

101

South Korea

2,851 international families

SEOUL NAT UNIV R&DB FOUNDATION

SEEGENE INC

UNIV YONSEI IACF

UNIV KOREA RES & BUS FOUND

UNIV ULSAN FOUND IND COOP

ASAN FOUND

160

129

126

105

Germany

United States

Japan

South Korea

China

Germany

24,048

16,321

11,491

8,566

3,398

Crosswalk

How Genomics & Biological Data is matched to the patent classifications. The entries below were chosen for it; each stands for itself and everything beneath it in the scheme, 80 Cooperative entries in all. A patent family counts when any of its codes, in either scheme and at any office, falls under one of them. Codes since retired are placed under the entries that replaced them.

Entry	Title in the scheme	Why it is chosen	CPC codes	IPC codes	Documents
C12Q1/68	Measuring or testing processes involving enzymes, nucleic acids or microorganisms; Compositions therefor; Processes of preparing such compositions involving nucleic acids	Nucleic acid analysis: sequencing, amplification, probes	42	41	1,052,217
G16B	Bioinformatics, i.e. information and communication technology [ict] specially adapted for genetic or protein-related data processing in computational molecular biology	Bioinformatics and genomic data processing	37	39	388,324

CPC and IPC codes are the codes in use on patent documents, at any office, that fall under the entry. Documents is the larger of the two schemes' counts of documents carrying one of them. An entry with no IPC codes can be told apart only in the Cooperative scheme.

The Cooperative codes in use that count towards Genomics & Biological Data: 79 codes on 1,440,541 documents. The full crosswalk is in the cpc-to-capability.csv download.

Code	Title	Under entry	How placed	Documents
C12Q1/6886	Nucleic acid products used in the analysis of nucleic acids, e.g. primers or probes for diseases caused by alterations of genetic material for cancer	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	132,760
C12Q1/6883	Nucleic acid products used in the analysis of nucleic acids, e.g. primers or probes for diseases caused by alterations of genetic material	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	109,940
C12Q1/6806	Preparing nucleic acids for analysis, e.g. for polymerase chain reaction [PCR] assay	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	69,216
C12Q1/6869	Methods for sequencing	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	65,074
C12Q1/686	Polymerase chain reaction [PCR]	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	63,033
C12Q1/6895	Nucleic acid products used in the analysis of nucleic acids, e.g. primers or probes for detection or identification of organisms for plants, fungi or algae	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	51,715
C12Q1/68	Measuring or testing processes involving enzymes, nucleic acids or microorganisms; Compositions therefor; Processes of preparing such compositions involving nucleic acids	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	47,613
C12Q1/689	Nucleic acid products used in the analysis of nucleic acids, e.g. primers or probes for detection or identification of organisms for bacteria	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	45,472
G16B40/00	ICT specially adapted for biostatistics; ICT specially adapted for bioinformatics-related machine learning or data mining, e.g. knowledge discovery or pattern finding	G16B	In the scheme	39,203
G16B20/00	ICT specially adapted for functional genomics or proteomics, e.g. genotype-phenotype associations	G16B	In the scheme	37,633
G16B30/00	ICT specially adapted for sequence analysis involving nucleotides or amino acids	G16B	In the scheme	35,092
C12Q1/6844	Nucleic acid amplification reactions	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	35,078
C12Q1/6876	Nucleic acid products used in the analysis of nucleic acids, e.g. primers or probes	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	34,912
C12Q1/6827	Hybridisation assays for detection of mutation or polymorphism	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	33,060
G16B20/20	Allele or variant detection, e.g. single nucleotide polymorphism [SNP] detection	G16B	In the scheme	31,013
C12Q1/6851	Quantitative amplification	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	29,389
C12Q1/6888	Nucleic acid products used in the analysis of nucleic acids, e.g. primers or probes for detection or identification of organisms	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	28,489
C12Q1/6858	Allele-specific amplification	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	27,186
C12Q1/6837	Enzymatic or biochemical coupling of nucleic acids to a solid phase using probe arrays or probe chips	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	26,884
C12Q1/6816	Hybridisation assays characterised by the detection means	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	24,415
C12Q1/6874	Methods for sequencing involving nucleic acid arrays, e.g. sequencing by hybridisation	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	24,337
G16B30/10	Sequence alignment; Homology search	G16B	In the scheme	24,092
G16B40/20	Supervised data analysis	G16B	In the scheme	23,647
C12Q1/6809	Methods for determination or identification of nucleic acids involving differential detection	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	17,459
G16B25/10	Gene or protein expression profiling; Expression-ratio estimation or normalisation	G16B	In the scheme	17,250
G16B50/00	ICT programming tools or database systems specially adapted for bioinformatics	G16B	In the scheme	16,055
G16B25/00	ICT specially adapted for hybridisation; ICT specially adapted for gene or protein expression	G16B	In the scheme	15,609
G16B5/00	ICT specially adapted for modelling or simulations in systems biology, e.g. gene-regulatory networks, protein interaction networks or metabolic networks	G16B	In the scheme	15,323
C12Q1/6834	Enzymatic or biochemical coupling of nucleic acids to a solid phase	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	14,915
C12Q1/6897	Measuring or testing processes involving enzymes, nucleic acids or microorganisms; Compositions therefor; Processes of preparing such compositions involving nucleic acids involving reporter genes operably linked to promoters	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	14,510
C12Q1/6881	Nucleic acid products used in the analysis of nucleic acids, e.g. primers or probes for tissue or cell typing, e.g. human leukocyte antigen [HLA] probes	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	14,101
C12Q1/6813	Hybridisation assays	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	13,288
C12Q1/6825	Nucleic acid detection involving sensors	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	13,034
C12Q1/6804	Nucleic acid analysis using immunogens	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	12,242
C12Q1/6841	In situ hybridisation	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	12,041
C12Q1/6853	Nucleic acid amplification reactions using modified primers or templates	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	11,756
C12Q1/6818	Hybridisation assays characterised by the detection means involving interaction of two or more labels, e.g. resonant energy transfer	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	11,080
C12Q1/6848	Nucleic acid amplification reactions characterised by the means for preventing contamination or increasing the specificity or sensitivity of an amplification reaction	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	10,609
G16B15/00	ICT specially adapted for analysing two-dimensional [2D] or three-dimensional [3D] molecular structures, e.g. structural or functional relations or structure alignment	G16B	In the scheme	10,530
G16B15/30	Drug targeting using structural data; Docking or binding prediction	G16B	In the scheme	10,168
G16B40/10	Signal processing, e.g. from mass spectrometry [MS] or from PCR	G16B	In the scheme	9,390
G16B45/00	ICT specially adapted for bioinformatics-related data visualisation, e.g. displaying of maps or networks	G16B	In the scheme	9,146
G16B20/30	Detection of binding sites or motifs	G16B	In the scheme	8,839
C12Q1/6811	Selection methods for production or design of target specific oligonucleotides or binding molecules	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	8,156
G16B50/30	Data warehousing; Computing architectures	G16B	In the scheme	8,083
C12Q1/6855	Ligating adaptors	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	7,950
G16B40/30	Unsupervised data analysis	G16B	In the scheme	7,904
G16B20/10	Ploidy or copy number detection	G16B	In the scheme	7,777
C12Q1/682	Signal amplification	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	7,627
G16B20/50	Mutagenesis	G16B	In the scheme	6,979
G16B25/20	Polymerase chain reaction [PCR]; Primer or probe design; Probe optimisation	G16B	In the scheme	5,978
G16B30/20	Sequence assembly	G16B	In the scheme	5,964
C12Q1/6823	Release of bound markers	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	5,479
C12Q1/683	Hybridisation assays for detection of mutation or polymorphism involving restriction enzymes, e.g. restriction fragment length polymorphism [RFLP]	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	5,406
G16B20/40	Population genetics; Linkage disequilibrium	G16B	In the scheme	5,288
C12Q1/6832	Enhancement of hybridisation reaction	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	5,054
G16B35/00	ICT specially adapted for in silico combinatorial libraries of nucleic acids, proteins or peptides	G16B	In the scheme	4,683
G16B15/20	Protein or domain folding	G16B	In the scheme	4,372
G16B5/20	Probabilistic models	G16B	In the scheme	4,046
G16B99/00	Subject matter not provided for in other groups of this subclass	G16B	In the scheme	3,847
C12Q1/6865	Promoter-based amplification, e.g. nucleic acid sequence amplification [NASBA], self-sustained sequence replication [3SR] or transcription-based amplification system [TAS]	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	3,841
G16B50/10	Ontologies; Annotations	G16B	In the scheme	3,532
G16B35/20	Screening of libraries	G16B	In the scheme	3,309
C12Q1/6846	Common amplification features	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	3,200
C12Q1/6893	Nucleic acid products used in the analysis of nucleic acids, e.g. primers or probes for detection or identification of organisms for protozoa	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	2,867
C12Q1/6879	Nucleic acid products used in the analysis of nucleic acids, e.g. primers or probes for sex determination	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	2,750
G16B10/00	ICT specially adapted for evolutionary bioinformatics, e.g. phylogenetic tree construction or analysis	G16B	In the scheme	2,697
C12Q1/6872	Methods for sequencing involving mass spectrometry	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	2,284
G16B35/10	Design of libraries	G16B	In the scheme	2,169
C12Q1/6862	Ligase chain reaction [LCR]	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	2,030
G16B50/20	Heterogeneous data integration	G16B	In the scheme	1,936
G16B50/50	Compression of genetic data	G16B	In the scheme	1,861
G16B50/40	Encryption of genetic data	G16B	In the scheme	1,458
C12Q1/6839	Triple helix formation or other higher order conformations in hybridisation assays	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	1,350
G16B5/30	Dynamic-time models	G16B	In the scheme	1,325
G16B25/30	Microarray design	G16B	In the scheme	850
G16B15/10	Nucleic acid folding	G16B	In the scheme	696
C12Q1/6867	Replicase-based amplification, e.g. using Q-beta replicase	C12Q1/68	In the scheme	615
G16B5/10	Boolean models	G16B	In the scheme	580

Match: Direct

The capability is itself a technology or a kind of physical system, and the classification names it. C12Q1/68 includes routine nucleic acid diagnostics as well as sequencing, which is separable only in CPC (C12Q1/6869). The crosswalk is a first pass that nobody has reviewed.

Genomics & Biological Data

Year by year

Volume

Share by country

Country leaderboard

Ten largest

Applicants

Global

United States

China

Japan

South Korea

Germany

Similar capabilities

Crosswalk

Other capabilities in Biotechnology & Health Technologies