The ranked leader in this dataset holds 506 records, well ahead of the fifth-ranked assignee at 258 and the tenth at 221. That said, the top 5 assignees combined account for only 11.0% of all 17,536 records in scope, and the top 10 reach 17.7%, so no single company controls the field. The remaining filings are spread across a long tail of the 100 ranked assignees plus entities outside that ranking, which matters for anyone assuming a small set of blocking portfolios.

Filing peaked in 2017 at 980 records and has since declined; the most reliable complete-year comparison, 2021 to 2024, shows a -25% drop from 835 to 626. That is a genuine pullback rather than an artefact of recent data being incomplete. The 2025 and 2026 figures in any chart should be read cautiously, since publication typically lags filing by around 18 months and those years will fill in as more records publish.

The bulk of activity sits in A61K, medicinal preparations, which touches 81.8% of the 17,536 records in scope, and A61P, therapeutic activity of compounds, at 51.4%. Beneath those, C07D (heterocyclic compounds, 29.8%) and C07K (peptides and proteins, 18.5%) show meaningful molecular and biologic claim activity. A61Q, the cosmetics-use class, covers only 4.9% of records, which is thin relative to how much commercial activity in hair care sits on cosmetic rather than therapeutic framing.

EP3668482B1 is a combination-therapy patent for hair loss, granted in January 2024 to an individual inventor. Because it is a single granted family rather than part of a large blocking portfolio, its practical reach depends on the specific combination and dosing claims it recites, which a claim-by-claim read is needed to confirm. Given the field's low concentration at the top of the leaderboard, no single grant here is likely to control the whole combination-therapy approach outright.

The classification data points to cosmetic-use claims (A61Q, 4.9% of records) and analytical or testing claims (G01N, 3.8%) as comparatively under-claimed relative to the dominant A61K and A61P formulation classes. Adherence-tracking, clinical-photography-based response scoring, and vehicle-penetration enhancement for topical actives are specific sub-areas within that thinner coverage worth a closer prior-art check. Because filing concentration at the top of the leaderboard is low overall, gaps like these are unlikely to be occupied by a single dominant filer.