In this dataset of 170 records, one academic assignee leads with 25 records, and the top five assignees together hold 93 records, or 54.7% of everything in scope. The ranking runs to 32 companies total, with a clear drop from fifth place (14 records) to tenth place (7 records), so the field is concentrated at the top rather than evenly spread. Leadership by record count does not necessarily mean leadership in commercial GLP-1 drugs on the market, since this scope is filtered to specific technical routes like half-life extension and oral formulation.

Filing activity peaked at 34 records in 2021 and had fallen back to 19 by the 2022 midpoint, and several of the leading assignees show zero filings in the most recent year with year-over-year drops of -100%. That said, publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the most recent one or two years in any patent trend understate real activity. The honest read is that the core mechanism claims look settled, while newer formulation and manufacturing filings may still be working through the publication pipeline.

Medicinal preparation claims under A61K appear on 94.7% of the 170 records in scope, and therapeutic-activity claims under A61P appear on 74.1%, making dosing, formulation and administration the most contested ground. Peptide and protein structure claims under C07K appear on only 47.6% of records, meaning the underlying peptide backbone is less universally claimed than how it is dosed and delivered. This gap is where a genuinely novel peptide sequence can still find room even inside a crowded formulation landscape.

US9200083B2, assigned to Duke University and published in December 2015, claims methods of treating diabetes using therapeutic agents that combine a GLP-1 receptor agonist with elastin-like peptides (ELPs), along with the encoding polynucleotides and methods of making and using them. It sits in the same citation cluster as several of the most-cited records in this landscape, all built around ELP fusion for half-life extension. Anyone building a GLP-1 therapeutic that uses ELP-based half-life extension needs to read this family's claims closely before assuming the design is clear.

The thinnest classes in this dataset are C07H sugar-and-nucleic-acid conjugation (1.8% of records), C07C acyclic and carbocyclic backbone chemistry (0.6%), and C12N genetic-engineering approaches (5.9%), all well below the 94.7% coverage of core A61K formulation claims. Oral bioavailability enhancement and GIP/glucagon tri-agonist dosing regimens also show thinner coverage relative to the dominant mechanism claims. These branches are under-claimed relative to the core mechanism space, but thin coverage in a filtered dataset is a starting hypothesis for a freedom-to-operate check, not a guarantee of open ground.