The assignee ranking in this dataset covers 21 companies and individual inventors, with one organisation holding 29 records — well ahead of the fifth-place figure of 8 and the tenth-place figure of 4. That leader’s portfolio concentrates around barcoding-based sequencing methods for partitioning and analysing single cells, the same technical area covered by the most-cited prior art in this corpus. The rest of the ranked field is a mix of universities, instrument makers, a pharmaceutical company and independent named inventors, each holding narrower single-digit portfolios.

Not on the evidence available. Filings peaked at 16 records in 2022, and the tracked window shows a fall from 9 in 2021 to 0 in 2024, but patent publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months. That means 2024 through 2026 records are still being published and should not yet be read as a real decline; a reliable answer will only be available once those cohorts have finished publishing.

The search underlying this landscape targets patents describing both the sample constraint — single cell or low input samples, carrier proteome techniques — and the specific bottlenecks that limit those methods, including surface adsorption loss, ion transmission efficiency, coverage depth, quantitative accuracy and throughput. In practice this covers mass spectrometry hardware, microfluidic and chemical sample preparation, and barcoding-based approaches adapted from single-cell genomics workflows.