Intellectual property management of biosequence information from a patent searching perspective

With recent advances in biotech research tools, the use of biosequence information has greatly facilitated the R&D process in the pharmaceutical and other life sciences industries. Concurrently, it has presented substantial challenges in the management of biosequence related intellectual property, due to the dramatic increase in the amount of sequence data, the nature of claims on sequences as well as limitations in available database resources for sequence analysis and searches. This paper discusses some of these challenges in-depth, and suggests ways to alleviate difficulties associated with conducting sequence-based patent information searches.