AIDS Patents Now Available Free through Internet

On October 26, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that
the text of more than 1500 AIDS-related patents is now online
on the Internet. The patents can be searched by any word in
the text, or in other ways; and the full patent (or only
parts of it) can be printed out immediately.

AIDS TREATMENT NEWS tried out this database shortly after it
was available; we believe it will be valuable to researchers
seeking in-depth information about certain treatments. The
system is very easy to use, once one is set up to use the
Internet. First, we had no trouble finding the patent
database, without being told where it was located; we looked
under U.S. government, then under Department of Commerce,
then under the PTO (Patent and Trademark Office), then under
AIDS. Once we got there, using the database was self-
explanatory; instructions are available, but we did not need
them for simple searches.

As a test, we used the system to look for patents relevant to
"compound Q," long a controversial potential treatment for
HIV. The technical name for compound Q is trichosanthin, so
we searched for that. We found 10 patents, and looked at the
"front page" for each. This page has the patent number, the
date the application was filed and the date the patent was
issued, the inventors, the assignee (the company assigned the
rights), an abstract of the patent, and other brief
information. We also searched under "RIP" (ribosome-
inactivating protein, which is the class of agents to which
Compound Q belongs), and found 18 patents, including many of
the trichosanthin ones. We printed out one complete patent,
and saved another in our computer, so we could use a word
processor to locate all instances of certain words within the
text.

Computer and Internet Information

The patent database is available through World Wide Web, a
"hypertext" system for navigating the Internet. With World
Wide Web, you see a document, with certain words or phrases
underlined (or otherwise highlighted or noted). You simply
"click" on any highlighted word or phrase to get more
information on that topic. That information may be in a
different computer, even on a different continent; you as the
user do not need to know where it physically resides. This
makes World Wide Web so easy to use that even computer
novices can be effective in minutes -- provided that an
expert sets up the software for them.

The only drawback is that, for beginners, getting set up to
use the Internet can be difficult. We have heard there are
new products, such as "Internet in a Box," which make it much
easier to get started, but we have not seen these products
ourselves.

Some Internet services also allow use of World Wide Web with
an ordinary terminal program, without the graphical interface
provided by Web browsers like Mosaic or MacWeb. And those
without access to World Wide Web can use the patent database
through an electronic mail gateway; for more information,
send a message containing the single word HELP to
ezgate@cnidr.org.

In case the system you are using needs a URL (Universal
Resource Locator) to find the U.S. Patent and Trademark
database, you can use http://www.uspto.gov; From there it
should be straightforward to find the AIDS patent database.
(We did not publish the URL for the AIDS patent database
itself, since this may change soon when the database is moved
to a larger computer.)

Additional Information

Patents are useful for researchers seeking in-depth
information, but seldom for guiding treatment decisions. It
usually takes years before patents are granted; until then
the applications are confidential. This means that medical
practice will usually be far ahead of the patent. But the
patent will often have the most detailed technical
information available -- more detailed than articles in
technical journals -- because the patent system is set up to
force inventors to fully disclose their technology in order
to assert their claim of exclusive right to it. This makes
the Patent and Trademark Office a huge database of useful
information, open to the public; even while the patent is in
force and the technology is proprietary, others can use this
information (with or without the patent owner's permission)
to make other inventions, or for other purposes.

The information placed in the AIDS patent database this month
is not new; anyone could buy printed copies of the same
patents, and various systems for computer searching are
available, although usually they are expensive. The advantage
of the new system is that it makes AIDS-related patents
easily and immediately available, 24 hours a day, in a
computer-searchable form, to researchers throughout the
world. There is no charge for the service, nor any need to
get permission or make advance arrangements to use it.

This patent database software was designed for the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office by CNIDR (Clearinghouse for
Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval), an
organization created by MCNC, of Research Triangle Park,
North Carolina. MCNC [formerly called Microelectronics Center
of North Carolina, but now known by its initials] is a
private, nonprofit corporation, established in 1992 with the
support of the National Science Foundation. AT&T is also
contributing to this project by providing computer services,
as the demand is expected to overload the computers at MCNC.