The Lens is an online patent search facility and knowledge resource, provided by Cambia, an independent, international non-profit organization dedicated to democratizing innovation. Launched in 2000, the Patent Lens allowed free searching of over 10 million full-text patent documents, including United States patents and applications, Australian patents and applications, European patents and Patent Cooperation Treaty applications. The Patent Lens was distinguished as being the only not-for-profit facility of its kind, with international coverage and links to non-patent literature and tutorials. In 2013 the Patent Lens was officially replaced with Cambia's new site The Lens. The Lens made improvements in the visual presentation of patent analysis and workspace management. It also features a biological facility with a number of advanced tools for searching and analysing sequences found in patents.
In addition to the patent search engine, the Lens also hosts a number of “technology landscapes”. These landscapes serve as interpretation maps that analyze volumes of specialized patent, scientific, technical and business data around particular topics into a more navigable form. In the field of health and medicine, landscapes have been created for human genome patenting, the influenza genome, the human Telomerase gene, molecular markers outside gene sequences, and adjuvants. For agriculture and the environment, landscapes exist to describe the Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of plants, promoters used to regulate gene expression, antibiotic resistance genes and their uses in plant genetic transformation, resistance to Phosphinothricin, positive selection, bioindicators/ambiosensors, and the rice genome. From 2000-2004, the Rockefeller Foundation backed development of the initial technology landscapes. In 2005, the Patent Lens made the landscapes fully navigable, interactive, and updatable by users.
Endorsement
The landscaping activities of the Patent Lens have been endorsed by Dr. Francis Gurry, director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization in March, 2009, in 'view of the shared objective of making patent information systems more comprehensive and accessible, and turning raw patent data into useful information resources so as to strengthen the empirical basis of international policy processes.' Nature Biotechnology has called the Patent Lens 'a giant leap in the right direction' for providing researchers, technology transfer offices and company executives a facile means of establishing the novelty of their offerings and the nature of their competitors' inventions.
