A single assignee leads this dataset with 47 of the 154 records in scope, well ahead of the field. The next several positions cluster closely together, with fifth place at 6 records and tenth place at 5, before a long tail of companies with one or two filings each. Overall, the top five assignees combined hold 58.4% of all 154 records, so most core assay-chemistry claim space sits with a small group rather than being spread evenly across the 42 ranked companies.

US6316265B1, assigned to Abbott Laboratories and published in 2001, claims a procedure for determining standardized percent glycated hemoglobin using a solid phase coupled to boronic acid, followed by a labeled antibody to human hemoglobin whose signal is proportional to %GHb. It is a foundational boronate-affinity plus immunoassay combination correlated to the DCCT reference standard. Anyone building a similar solid-phase boronate capture step paired with antibody-based signal generation needs to check their specific reagent chemistry and workflow against this claim rather than assume the general concept is free to use, since the patent is old enough that its core term may have expired but related family members or continuations could still be active.

Filing peaked in 2020 at 14 published records, then declined to 6 in 2021 and 4 in 2024, a 33% drop over that three-year span. However, 2025 and 2026 figures are still incomplete because publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so the most recent years understate real activity. The honest read is that the field has cooled from its 2020 high point through the last fully-observable year, 2024, without yet knowing whether that decline continues.

Relative to the 48.7% of records carrying G01N material-analysis claims, healthcare informatics (G16H, 9.1%) and digital data processing (G06F, 3.2%) are thinly claimed. That suggests algorithmic interpretation of HbA1c readings, glucose-correlation software, and point-of-care variant-interference flagging are less crowded than the core assay chemistry itself. A first claim in this space would likely center on a computational method for correcting or flagging variant hemoglobin interference from raw assay signal, rather than another boronate-affinity or immunoassay construction.

It is concentrated at the top and long-tailed below it: the top five assignees hold 58.4% of all 154 records, and the top ten extend that to 76.0%. Only 42 companies appear in the ranking at all, meaning a large share of the remaining records are held by a long tail of single- or few-filing entrants. Co-filing is also uncommon, with only 7 co-assignee pairs identified across the whole dataset, so most portfolios were built independently rather than through joint ventures.