Trends of technological innovation in herbal products

The therapeutic properties of plants are greatly explored by the pharmaceutical industries, they are sources of innovation for industrial property. Formulation of new products can be protected through the patent deposits, market strategy used by companies and researchers in the industry. Therefore, this research aims to conduct a survey of patents related to herbal therapeutic products to trace the technological profile and analyze trends in the use of plant genetic resources in its composition. The methodology adopted was Patent Mining in the Software Orbit Intelligence, used to filter the database and generate graphs. Trend analysis was based on patents selected by specific search script which resulted in 9.820 pharmaceutical patent deposits, 68.6% granted. As far as the origin of the publication was concerned, the United States and Japan were predominant, but for the inventors, companies and universities, the highlights were Italy and India. Species most used in the composition of the patents were of the taxonomic classification Magnoliophyta, family Fabaceae. It is concluded that patents are relevant technological indicators to trace the profile of the productive sector of herbal products, in addition to verifying trends in the use of plant genetic resources.