Rice's European Patents

Let's talk about the patents that Rice University owns that were granted in Europe. Little attention has been paid to these in the past, to the point that one might be surprised to learn Rice owns patents in Europe.

At present, there are 5 active patents assigned to Rice by the European Patent Office (EPO), according to Lens.org.

Among them, the most recently granted was EP 3,033,346 B1, Derivatives of Uncialamycin, Methods of Synthesis and Their Use as Antitumor Agents. Granted January 8, 2020, it was invented by a team of 6 inventors (Kyriacos C. Nicolaou, Min Lu, Debashis Mandal, Sanjeev Gangwar, Naidu S. Chowdari, and Yam B. Poudel) and co-owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and The Scripps Research Institute. The same patent is also filed with the USPTO, under the same title, and the applications were submitted on the same day. However, there were three patents granted by the USPTO stemming from the first application set: US 9,777,013; US 10,233,192; and US 10,889,590. 

EP 3,033,346: Derivatives of Uncialamycin, Methods of Synthesis and their Use as Antitumor Agents

There is nothing obvious about these five inventions indicating why Rice pursued their ownership in the EU. Only one, EP 2,753,733 B1, Carbon Nanotubes Fiber Having Low Resistivity, High Modulus and/or High Thermal Conductivity and a Method of Preparing Such Fibers by Spinning Using a Fiber Spin-Dope, is co-owner or co-invented by an entity or people located in Europe. In that case, half the invention team and Conyar B.V. are from the Netherlands. 

EP 2,753,733: Carbon Nanotubes Fiber Having Low Resistivity, High Modulus and/or High Thermal Conductivity and a Method of Preparing Such Fibers by Spinning Using a Fiber Spin-Dope

The other four are either co-owned by American entities or Rice entirely. Perhaps there are commercial interests abroad that aren't obvious in a patent.

Expanding results to include expired patents doesn't really increase our results; evidently there are only two more EPO Rice patents. None of them were filed before 1998, and that one expired patent is an outlier by about 4-5 years. A few more results pop up if applications are included, but again the increase is minimal.

EXPIRED! Hemoglobin Mutants with Reduced Nitric Oxide Scavenging

With so few EPO patents, past, present, and potential, we simply must conclude Rice doesn't have much interest in owner European IP.