Imaging In Situ Profiling Patents: Leaders, Trends & White Space 2026
Imaging-Based In Situ Profiling Patents: Filing Trends and Who Holds the Claim Space
Concentrated but not locked up. the top 5 assignees hold 23.4% of all 8,836 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 34.6% — leaving most of the field to a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants. Annual filings rose from 322 in 2017 to a peak of 404 in 2022. Using only complete years, filings fell -36% from 349 in 2021 to 223 in 2024. Data for 2025 and 2026 is still incomplete because publication typically lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the apparent drop in the most recent one or two years should not be read as the field slowing further.
- 1GENOMIC HEALTH INC7.6%
- 2ATYR PHARM INC4.6%
- 3PANGU BIOPHARMA LTD4.5%
- 410X GENOMICS INC4.1%
- 5KURA ONCOLOGY INC2.6%
See the full imaging based in situ profiling analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions about this landscape
Who holds the most patents in imaging-based in situ profiling?
One assignee leads the ranked field with 668 records, well ahead of the fifth-placed assignee at 229 and the tenth at 178. The top 5 assignees combined hold 23.4% of all 8,836 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 34.6%. That leaves a substantial majority of filings spread across a long tail of smaller and single-filing entrants, so leadership at the top does not translate into control of the whole field.
Is patent filing in this field growing or slowing down?
Filing activity grew from 322 records in 2017 to a peak of 404 in 2022, then declined using complete-year data to 223 in 2024 — a -36% drop from the 349 filed in 2021. Figures for 2025 and 2026 are still incomplete because patent publication typically lags the actual filing date by around 18 months, so the most recent one to two years will rise as more records are published. Based on the complete-year trend through 2024, the field has genuinely cooled from its 2022 high.
What technical problems do these patents actually address?
The search underlying this landscape combines core methods — in situ hybridization, in situ sequencing and multiplexed imaging — with specific practical constraints: optical crowding, decoding error rate, probe design, autofluorescence background, imaging cycle time and panel size limit. In practice this means claims range from probe chemistry and signal amplification through to image processing and decoding algorithms that let a method scale beyond a handful of targets per tissue section.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Imaging Based In Situ Profiling covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.