It covers the bare essentials of intellectual property rights that the biotechnologist needs and nothing more. Focus is on practical skills: how to search for patents and applications, follow application through the patenting system in Europe and the USA; and how to read and analyze patents, which hopefully will lead to writing better patent applications.

The eighth edition reflects recent changes in the world of patents. Most notable is that European patents with unitary effect have finally been rolled out. They have been well received and are already used extensively; and thus represent an important topic to cover. The book aims at providing an in-depth coverage of how to search for patents and map the patent landscape of a given invention. All four databases that are covered have undergone substantial developments: Derwent Innovations Index has a new graphical user interface. So has USPTO’s advanced search and it has implemented an entirely new query syntax. Patentscope has added substructure search to their chemical structure search facility and SciFinder has implemented a plethora of sequence search tools.