They began their research by searching

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Thousands of patent applications in the s involved traditional Indian medicine and many lawsuits ensued. But it was difficult to invalidate the novelty of any given remedy without published proof of prior use. To that end the Indian government spearheaded an effort in to create a massive electronic repository of herbal prior art. By the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library TKDL spanned more than million pages of Indian literature including herbal formulations from the Unani Yoga Ayurveda and Siddha medical systems.

Texts that spanned centuries were first classified into thousands of subgroups and then translated from multiple Indian languages into English German Japanese French and Spanish. Is an ages old turmeric remedy for Chinese Overseas America Number Data wounds patentable Photo iStockPhoto Choudhury and Khanna aimed to find out whether anything about patent applications changed after each office began employing the TKDL.  through every patent filed by the US Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office between and . They detail their findings in the working paper Codifying Prior Art and Patenting Natural Experiment of Herbal Patent Prior Art Adoption at the EPO and USPTO pdf . The professors discovered a significant shift in the nature of herbal patents. herbal patents tended to focus purely on natural herbs. In the years after the introduction of.



TKDL however patents tended toward herbal synthetic hybrids. An herbal patent filed in was percent more likely to include a synthetic formulation than a patent filed in . There was no prior art saying what happens when you mix turmeric with an inorganic property for instance Choudhury says. The TKDL actually seemed to inspire new research. Choudhury and Khanna also noticed an increase in herbal patent filing in the mid s despite the publicity of patent related lawsuits happening at the time the turmeric case a lawsuit involving curative properties of the neem tree and many others.