Patent landscape analysis of anti-obesity pharmacotherapy: Mechanisms, assignees, and international filing strategies

Recent advances in anti-obesity pharmacotherapy have expanded therapeutic opportunities, but whether current patenting activity reflects diversified therapeutic development remains unclear. We conducted a patent landscape analysis of A61P 3/04-classified patent families published between January 1, 2023, and September 11, 2025, in the Questel Orbit Intelligence database. Expert manual curation and model-assisted extraction were used to characterize mechanisms of action, therapeutic classes, assignee profiles, geographic distribution, and patent family expansion. Of 2866 retrieved patent families, 2677 met inclusion criteria. Most patent families were single-document families (76.4%). Earliest priority filings were strongly concentrated in China (65.4%), followed by the United States (11.3%) and South Korea (9.6%). More than half of patent families were classified as unclassified agents (53.8%), and 61.5% lacked an explicitly defined mechanism of action. Among defined mechanisms, GLP-1 receptor agonism predominated, whereas most other mechanisms appeared infrequently. Patent families with defined mechanisms showed broader family expansion. These findings indicate a patent landscape characterized by limited mechanistic specification, strong geographic concentration, and constrained diversification beyond clinically validated mechanisms. Patent counts alone may therefore provide an incomplete picture of innovation, whereas combining patent family indicators with mechanism-level analysis provides a more informative view of the contemporary patent landscape in anti-obesity pharmacotherapy.