Press releases

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Columbus, Ohio — June 14, 2020 — The National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) of Brazil, and CAS, a division of the not-for-profit American Chemical Society that specializes in scientific information solutions, signed a formal Technical Cooperation Agreement on June 4, 2020. This agreement is the culmination of more than 18 months of work and collaboration between the organizations to test and optimize the application of CAS technology to expedite patent examination. The initiative reinforces INPI's strategy for increasing efficiency and reducing patent examination time through the use of technology helping to overcome the rapid growth of patent application volume and complexity seen in Brazil, and globally, in recent years.

“Embracing new technology approaches is a critical strategy needed to meet our commitment to reduce Brazil’s application backlog by 80% in the next 2 years”, said INPI President, Dr. Claudio Furtado. “The unique technology and expertise that CAS has provided demonstrate a measurable impact on our examiners’ efficiency. We are pleased with the progress to date and look forward to building on this partnership to achieve our objective.”

“Timely review of patent applications is critical to encouraging global innovation, and backlogs have very real commercial and human consequences” said Manuel Guzman, President of CAS. “The world’s patent offices face unprecedented challenges as application volume and complexity continue to grow faster than their available resources. We are committed to partnering with INPI, and other patent offices around the world, to help them overcome these challenges through development of customized solutions to accelerate their examination workflows.”

The CAS technology approach combines similarity scoring, workflow classification and knowledge-space exploration capabilities to uncover a reliable set of prior art, or previously published information relevant to the subject innovation, which expedites patent examiners’ work. “The innovative, forward-looking team at INPI has provided extremely valuable input and collaboration through this process to optimize our algorithms and approach” said Tim Wahlberg, Chief Product Officer, CAS. “The combined teams’ work to date clearly demonstrates that training algorithms with our extensive collection of human-curated data, and augmenting the machine learning outcomes with human insights from our team of scientists, is extremely effective.”

“Addressing the timeliness of application processing at INPI is a top priority for the examination function,” affirmed Liane Elizabeth Caldeira Lage, Director of Patents, Software and Topography of Integrated Circuits. “Assessing novelty of inventions in chemistry and all other scientific fields is especially challenging and this approach is showing great promise to expedite our work in these areas.”

About INPI

The National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) is the official government body responsible for Industrial Property rights in Brazil being a federal autarchy of the Ministry of Economy. INPI’s duties include: Trademarks registration, Patent grants, Technology Transfer and Franchising Contracts registration, Industrial Designs registration, Geographical Indications registration, Software registration and Topography of Integrated Circuits registration. Visit the INPI website at www.gov.br/inpi.

About CAS

CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society specializing in scientific information solutions, partners with R&D organizations globally to provide actionable insights that help them plan, innovate, protect their innovations, and predict how new markets and opportunities will evolve. Scientific researchers, patent professionals and business leaders around the world rely on our solutions and services to advise discovery and strategy. With more than 110 years' experience, no one knows more about scientific information than CAS. Learn more at www.cas.org.

CAS Media Contact:
Tina Tomeo
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