The ranked assignee list for this corpus is led by a single company holding 3,472 records, well ahead of the next several places, with fifth place at 353 and tenth at 233. The leading ten combined account for 27.4% of all 25,364 records in scope, which means the remaining three-quarters of filings are distributed across a long tail of universities, diagnostics companies, government research bodies and smaller specialty filers. This structure suggests the field is not gated by a small cartel of blocking portfolios, though the single leader’s position is substantial in absolute terms.

Filings peaked in 2017 at 794 and have since declined on a complete-year basis, falling from 720 in 2021 to 404 in 2024 — a -44% change over that span. Filings for 2025 and 2026 are lower still in the raw count, but that reflects publication lag of roughly 18 months rather than a real collapse in activity, since recent filings have not all published yet. Anyone using this trend to justify entering or avoiding the space should anchor on the 2021-to-2024 comparison, not the most recent one or two years.

A61K (medicinal preparations) covers 48.5% of the 25,364 records and C07K (peptides and proteins) covers 38.5%, making antibody and reagent chemistry the most heavily claimed layer. G01N (material analysis and testing) and C12N (microorganisms and genetic engineering) follow at 34.1% and 27.5% respectively. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC codes, these shares add up to well over 100%, so they should be read as coverage density per class, not as slices of a single pie.