Posts Tagged: "medical marijuana"

Increasingly, bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies are becoming the choice for most financial transactions within the nascent marijuana industry as the sector increases in value. North American marijuana sales reached $6.7 billion during 2016 and were expected to rise up to $20.2 billion annually by the year 2021… The USPTO published 390 patent applications related to blockchain tech, the underlying distributed ledger technology supporting bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, between January and July of this year. That represented a 90 percent increase over the number of blockchain-related patent applications published during the same period in 2016.

The patent space surrounding marijuana formulations for medical use is still wide open despite the current march towards legalization. According to patent portfolio analysis tools available through Innography, there are a total of 66 U.S. patent grants and 62 U.S. patent applications related to medical marijuana. As the pie chart here will show readers, the top three asset holders in this space are La Jolla, CA-based Auspex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ASPX), Leidos Holdings (NYSE:LDOS) and the University of Connecticut… In the middle of November, New York City-based biotech firm AXIM Biotechnologies (OTCMKTS:AXIM) announced that it had secured a new patent grant claiming the use of all cannabinoids in controlled-release chewing gum products containing cannabinoids.

What started as a curiosity in Colorado and Washington state in 2012 could have gained the momentum of a juggernaut: marijuana legalization. Now with California and other states passing initiatives to fully legalize recreational marijuana use in November 2016, a new multi-billion-dollar industry could be in the offing. Inventors are already at work on new methods of delivering THC in stronger and safer doses… But with cannabis still on the federal DEA Schedule I of controlled substances what can these idea people do to protect their intellectual property?… Ironically, the USTPO has granted a patent on certain cannabis strains to a California biotech institute even as it has disallowed marijuana-related trademarks.