Within this dataset, President and Fellows of Harvard College leads the assignee ranking with 21 records, well ahead of the next-ranked entities. The ranking includes only five entities in total, so this is a small, academically concentrated field rather than one with dozens of competing commercial players. Boston University is Harvard’s closest and most frequent collaborator, appearing together on 7 filings, the strongest co-assignee pairing found in the data.

Recorded filings peaked at 11 in 2017 and had fallen to 0 by 2024, a -100% change over the 2021-2024 span. However, patent publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so the 2025 and 2026 figures in this dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as a current trend. The honest read is that the last fully observable years show a lull, not that the technology has been abandoned.

US12649953B2, granted to President and Fellows of Harvard College in June 2026, covers shelf-stable compositions built on synthetic gene networks and cell-free systems that are lyophilized onto a solid support, with activation achieved simply by adding water. The claims extend to methods of use including sensing applications and logic functions, and the abstract explicitly names clinical, food-processing, industrial, military and consumer distribution contexts. It sits within the same ‘Paper-based synthetic gene networks’ family that produces two of the dataset’s most-cited records, so its claim scope should be checked closely by anyone designing a similar lyophilized paper-based sensor.