Transposon-Based Gene Delivery Patents: Filing Trends and Who Holds the Claims

The ranking covers 100 assignees by patent family, with the leading holder at 268 records, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 163 and tenth-place at 153. The top five combined account for 25.7% of all 4,513 records in scope, and the top ten reach 43.3%, which leaves more than half the field to a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants including universities and smaller biotechs. No single assignee holds anything close to a majority position, so freedom-to-operate work still needs to check the full ranked list rather than assuming one company controls the space.

Filings peaked in 2019 at 445 records and eased to 371 by 2021 and 255 by 2024, a -31% change over that three-year span. That looks like a plateau rather than a collapse, and the most recent one to two years in any such dataset are always understated because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months. A more accurate read is that the field grew quickly through 2019 and has since settled into a steadier filing rhythm.

Both systems appear together across this dataset's search scope, which does not separately break out claim volume by system name. What the data does show is that the surrounding claim language — integration site profile, cargo capacity, transposase delivery format, genotoxicity assessment, stable expression and excision footprint — is where the practical differentiation between systems tends to get claimed, rather than in the core transposase chemistry itself. Anyone comparing the two systems for a specific program should search each transposase name individually against these six practical dimensions.