Direct Electron Detector Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- Concentrated but not locked down. the top 5 assignees hold 21.4% of all 1,435 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 34.6% — a leader well ahead of a long tail of single- and double-digit filers.
- Filing has cooled from its 2023 peak. 225 records that year, with 2021-to-2024 filings down 12% (170 to 150) on the most recent years that can be read as complete.
- Claim density sits outside the detector core. H01J (electron & discharge tubes) covers just 13.2% of records, while biologics-adjacent classes like C07K and A61K dominate at 42.0% and 40.8%, pointing to where detector claims are being filed alongside downstream applications rather than in isolation.
Filing growth compares 2021 (170 records) with 2024 (150) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 1,435 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the direct electron detector patent record shows
Direct electron detector patents sit at the intersection of instrument hardware and the biological and materials workflows that depend on it. The search set defined here — 1,435 records published between 2015 and mid-2026 — spans claims on detector quantum efficiency, frame rate, dose fractionation and motion correction, alongside the radiation-damage and pixel-size constraints that shape how cryo-EM and related imaging platforms are built. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the most recent one or two years in any trend chart understate real filing activity.
Patent families, not raw document counts, are the fairer unit for judging where effort concentrates, because families neutralise aggressive continuation filing and multi-jurisdiction duplication. The ranking and trend figures on this page are built on that basis.
Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 1,435-record set: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claim volume.
A 2023 peak, then a pullback
Annual filings rose from 29 in 2017 to a peak of 225 in 2023. Comparing 2021 (170) to 2024 (150) — the most recent year that can be treated as complete — filings are down 12% over that span; 2025 and 2026 figures will continue to fill in as publication catches up, so they should not yet be read as a further decline.
Detector hardware sits inside a wider biologics footprint
C07K and A61K, the peptide/protein and medicinal-preparation classes, each cover more than 40% of the 1,435 records, with A61P and C12N close behind. H01J, the class most directly tied to electron-tube hardware, covers 13.2%. Because a single record can carry several IPC codes, these shares add up past 100% — the pattern to read from it is that detector claims are frequently bundled with the downstream biological or diagnostic application rather than filed as pure instrumentation.
Shares are the percentage of the 1,435 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Direct Electron Detectors with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about direct electron detectors and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited records in this set
System and method for electron cryomicroscopy (US20230135352A1)
Filed by United Kingdom Research and Innovation, this 2023 application claims a field-emission-gun electron cryomicroscopy system operating at 80–120 keV, with an objective lens whose chromatic aberration coefficient is selected to reach a target resolution, and a specimen holder positioned in the beam path.The claim scope centres on the lens/aberration-coefficient relationship rather than the detector itself, which shapes what downstream detector-side claims can still be filed without overlap.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US5812629A | Ultrahigh resolution interferometric x-ray imaging | 596 |
| 2 | US5181234A | X-ray backscatter detection system | 448 |
| 3 | US6982431B2 | Sample analysis systems | 369 |
| 4 | US20030127609A1 | Sample analysis systems | 319 |
| 5 | WO2019089828A1 | Lamellar lipid nanoparticles | 212 |
| 6 | US5760899A | High-sensitivity multispectral sensor | 209 |
| 7 | US20140293263A1 | LIDAR Comprising Polyhedron Transmission and Receiving Scanning Element | 172 |
| 8 | US4773087A | Quality of shadowgraphic x-ray images | 172 |
| 9 | US20040153229A1 | System and method for providing intelligent airbag deployment | 170 |
| 10 | US5149972A | Two excitation wavelength video imaging microscope | 150 |
Citation counts favour older filings by construction — a highly-cited 1990s x-ray imaging patent reflects decades of accumulated citations, not current commercial weight. Read this table as a map of foundational prior art, not a ranking of what matters today.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →Reading the concentration and momentum
The ranking, the trend and the citation table point to the same shape: a small set of research-heavy assignees ahead of a long tail, with momentum now flat to declining even among the leaders.
A leader well ahead of the field, then a long tail
The leading assignee holds 78 records against a fifth-place figure of 45 and a tenth-place figure of 36 — a steep drop-off after the top few names rather than a flat distribution. Combined, the top 5 account for 21.4% of all 1,435 records and the top 10 for 34.6%, leaving nearly two-thirds of the field held by assignees outside the ranked leaders.
Growth has flattened since the 2023 peak
Filings climbed steadily from 2017 through a 2023 peak of 225, then eased; comparing the two most recent complete years, 2021 to 2024, activity is down 12%. Several leading assignees show 0% or -100% year-on-year change in the most recent tracked year, though publication lag means the latest years are still filling in.
Detector hardware claims are the minority class
The classes with the largest share of the 1,435 records — C07K, A61K, A61P, C12N — belong to biologics and therapeutics, not instrumentation. H01J, the class closest to the detector hardware itself, covers only 13.2% of records, and H04N (pictorial communication) just 5.9%, suggesting most filings pair detector language with a specific biological application claim.
A small cluster of joint-filing relationships
Ten co-assignee pairs appear in the dataset, with the strongest links running between a Flemish biotechnology institute, a Brussels university and a nanopore technology firm — a pattern consistent with academic-industry co-development rather than broad cross-licensing across the field.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to direct electron detectors, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the claim space is still open
University and public-research consortia dominate the ranked leaders, with instrument makers and a handful of biopharma names filing detector-adjacent claims around specific therapeutic or diagnostic uses.
Public research institutions anchor the top of the ranking
The top of the ranked list is populated by university systems and public research bodies rather than a single instrument manufacturer, reflecting how much of the underlying detector science originates in academic cryo-EM and structural-biology programmes before licensing or spin-out.
Hardware specialists file a narrower, denser slice
Instrument-focused assignees concentrate their claims in electron-tube and detector-hardware classes, a narrower but more direct slice of the field than the biologics-heavy filers above them in the ranking.
Leading filers have gone quiet in the latest tracked year
Several of the most active historical assignees show flat or sharply reduced filing counts in the most recent tracked year, which is consistent with publication lag as much as with any real slowdown in R&D.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Vlaams Interuniversitair Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB) | 1 | — |
| Vrije Universiteit Brussel | 1 | 0% |
| FEI Company | 1 | — |
| The Regents of the University of California | 0 | -100% |
| Board of Regents of The University of Texas System | 0 | -100% |
| United Kingdom Research and Innovation | 0 | -100% |
| Genentech, Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| Sanofi | 0 | -100% |
Where to take this next
The dataset points to a field with public research leading claim volume and a cooling but still active filing rate. Two directions are worth following up.
Track the 2025–2026 publication catch-up
Because publication lags filing by about 18 months, the apparent 2024-onward slowdown needs re-checking once the current partial years fill in — re-run the trend query in six to twelve months before drawing conclusions about a real decline.
Explore filing trends in EurekaMap the white-space chips against active claims
The under-claimed sub-areas identified here — dose-fractionation readout, in-pixel motion correction, low-dose damage mitigation — warrant a focused prior-art search before committing to a first claim in any of them.
Run a white-space search in EurekaCommon questions about direct electron detector patents
The ranked leaders in this dataset are dominated by public university systems and research consortia rather than a single instrument manufacturer, with the top-ranked assignee holding 78 records out of 1,435 in scope. The top 5 assignees combined hold 21.4% of all records and the top 10 hold 34.6%, which leaves nearly two-thirds of filings spread across a long tail of smaller and single-filing entrants. This pattern suggests the underlying science is still substantially academic, with licensing and spin-outs following rather than leading the patent activity.
Filings rose steadily from 29 in 2017 to a peak of 225 in 2023, but comparing 2021 (170) to 2024 (150) — the two most recent years that can be treated as complete — shows a 12% decline. The 2025 and 2026 figures in any trend chart will look lower still, but that is a publication-lag artefact rather than evidence of a further drop, since publication typically lags actual filing by about 18 months. Treat 2024 as the most recent reliable data point until later years catch up.
The IPC composition shows peptide and protein chemistry (C07K, 42.0% of records) and medicinal preparations (A61K, 40.8%) as the largest classes, ahead of therapeutic-activity claims (A61P, 25.9%) and microorganism/genetic-engineering claims (C12N, 19.7%). Electron and discharge tube hardware (H01J), the class closest to the detector itself, covers only 13.2% of records. This means most filings in the set pair detector-related language with a specific biological or diagnostic application rather than claiming detector hardware in isolation.
US20230135352A1, filed by United Kingdom Research and Innovation in 2023, describes a field-emission-gun electron cryomicroscopy system operating in an 80–120 keV range, with an objective lens whose chromatic aberration coefficient is tuned to hit a target resolution and a specimen holder positioned in the beam path. The claim scope centres on the lens and aberration-coefficient relationship rather than on the detector element itself. That leaves detector-side claims — readout circuitry, dose fractionation logic, pixel architecture — comparatively open, though any system-level claim combining a similar lens arrangement with a new detector would need a careful freedom-to-operate check against it.
Based on the IPC composition, the thinnest coverage relative to the wider field sits in areas like dose-fractionation readout algorithms, in-pixel motion-correction circuitry, and detector-cost reduction architectures — sub-areas adjacent to the dense biologics and general-hardware classes but not well represented on their own. A first claim in one of these areas should be scoped narrowly around a specific circuit or algorithmic mechanism rather than a broad detector-system claim, since the broader system-level space already carries meaningful prior art from the ranked leaders.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.