A Patent Analysis in Nano Biosensors with Nanomaterials

Abstract: Over the past decades, biosensor technologies have experienced significant advances with the rapid development of novel nanomaterials and nanotechnologies. The analysis was performed using a patent dataset of nanobiosensors, including 2709 patent documents. The number of patents has been growing rapidly since 2000. Currently, China and the USA are the main contributors to the number of patents. Based on patent data, the most commonly used nanomaterials in biosensors are primarily metal-based, polymer-based, and carbon-based nanomaterials. Recently, the HCPs (highly cited patents, cited≥14) of biosensors include more than 10 types of nanomaterials, such as Ag NPs, Au NPs, graphene, CNTs, and polymer nanomaterials, indicating the diversity of nanomaterials and nanotechnologies used in biosensors. The number of HCPs from the USA is as high as 147, which is 3.5 times that of China. The use of nanomaterials in biosensors has been attracting increasing attention from researchers for decades. The sharp increase in patents since 2017 can be attributed to a significant number of new patents from India and China. In terms of the proportion of HCPs in the patent dataset, patented technologies from the US showed higher quality and value compared to those from other countries such as China, South Korea, and India. In the future, research on nanomaterials for biosensors, including metal and carbon-based nanomaterials, may focus on optimising their properties through the development of composite nanomaterials. With the application research of nucleic acid nanomaterials and MOFs, there could potentially be new technological breakthroughs in biosensors.