Native & Structural Mass Spectrometry Patents: Leaders, Trends 2026
Native and Structural Mass Spectrometry Patents: Who Holds the Ground
Filings concentrate hard at the top: the top 5 assignees account for 72.6% of all 106 records in scope, and the top 10 for 97.2% — this field has almost no long tail. Filings rose to a peak of 28 records in 2019, then eased. The 2021-to-2024 window is the most reliable recent comparison — 21 records down to 7, a -67% change — since 2025 and 2026 are still incomplete under the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication. Read the tail-end years as provisional, not as evidence the field has stopped.
- 1F HOFFMANN LA ROCHE & CO AG28
- 2REGENERON PHARMACEUTICALS INC25
- 3BRUKER SWITZERLAND AG9
- 4OHIO STATE INNOVATION FOUND8
- 5UNIV OF MARYLAND7
See the full native and structural mass spectrometry 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 on this landscape
Who are the leading patent holders in native and structural mass spectrometry?
Filing in this space is highly concentrated: the leading assignee alone holds 28 of the 106 records in scope, and the top 5 assignees together hold 72.6% of all records. By the time you reach the tenth-ranked assignee, that combined share reaches 97.2%, meaning almost the entire field sits with a small group of established filers rather than being spread across many independent entrants. Roche-affiliated entities and a cluster of named co-inventors around bi-specific antibody-digoxigenin complexes account for much of this concentration.
Is patent filing in native MS and HDX still growing?
Filing peaked at 28 records in 2019 and the most recent complete comparison, 2021 to 2024, shows a -67% decline from 21 records down to 7. However, patent publication typically lags the original filing by about 18 months, so the 2025-2026 figures in any dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as confirmation that the field is slowing further. A fair read is that the field passed an early filing peak around 2019 and has settled to a lower, but not yet fully visible, current rate.
What patent categories dominate this field?
Material analysis and testing (IPC class G01N) appears in 47.2% of the 106 records, making it the single most common class, followed closely by medicinal preparations (A61K) at 41.5% and peptide/protein chemistry (C07K) at 39.6%. Electron and discharge tube claims (H01J), covering mass spectrometry instrumentation itself, appear in 30.2% of records. Because a record can carry multiple IPC classes, these figures overlap rather than sum to 100%, and the overlap itself shows that instrumentation, therapeutic-use and analytical-method claims are frequently bundled into the same filing family.
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 Native and Structural Mass Spectrometry 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.