The leading assignee in this dataset holds 1,888 records, with a gradual drop-off to 777 at fifth place and 518 at tenth. No single company dominates the field outright: the top 5 combined account for only 9.0% of the 63,510 records in scope, and the top 10 combined reach 14.0%. That spread means the field is contested across a broad set of pharmaceutical, chemical and food-science filers rather than locked up by one or two companies.

Filings rose steadily to a peak of 887 in 2021, then declined to 539 by 2024 — a 39% drop over that three-year span. That is the most recent year the trend can be read reliably, since patent publication lags filing by roughly 18 months and 2025-2026 figures are still incomplete. The honest read is a pullback from a post-2021 high, not necessarily a long-term decline.

The dataset's records span pharmaceutical formulation classes far more heavily than industrial process classes. A61K (medicinal preparations) touches 15.7% of all 63,510 records, ahead of A61P therapeutic activity at 4.7%, A23L foods and beverages at 4.4%, and B01J chemical and physical processes at 4.3%. Because a single patent can carry several IPC codes, these percentages overlap rather than summing to 100%, but the ranking makes clear that drug and food formulation claims dominate over pure equipment or process engineering claims.

US20250262158A1, filed by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen and published in August 2025, claims a method for producing nano-in-micro encapsulated siRNA dry powder using spray drying of polyplex suspensions through an atomizing nozzle into a heated carrier gas stream. Anyone developing spray-dried nucleic-acid delivery formulations with similar polyplex-and-excipient encapsulation should review its claim scope closely, since it sits in one of the more recently active corners of the corpus. It does not, on its own, block conventional bulk powder or food-grade spray drying processes outside the nucleic-acid encapsulation route it describes.

Relative to the dense A61K formulation core, several process-control sub-areas show comparatively thin filing density in this dataset, including wall-deposition mitigation geometries, stickiness-point control through glass-transition tuning, and inline residual-moisture sensing. These are technically specific niches rather than broad categories, and low filing density signals open claim space, not lack of commercial relevance. A prospective filer should still run a full freedom-to-operate search against the most-cited foundational patents before assuming a gap is genuinely open.