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Overcoming the Patent Gap: A Guide to Patenting for Plastic Surgeons

Background: Patenting protects innovation, fosters academic incentives, promotes competition, and generates new revenue for clinician-inventors and their institutions. Despite these benefits, and despite plastic surgery’s history of innovation, plastic surgery–related patent applications are few. The goal of this article was to use unpublished data and formulate a robust discussion. Methods: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s boolean search was investigated between the timeline of 1975 and June 23, 2020, to identify patents related to the key phrases to contrast patent (both, issued and filed) tally in each specialty. Queries for two key phrases related to plastic surgery and a core plastic surgical activity, both with and without the added term “plastic surgery,” were performed. Results: Total patents with “cardiology” outnumber those with “plastic surgery” by 22,450 versus 7749 (i.e., almost 3:1). The overwhelming number of patents with “cosmetic” are non–plastic-surgery related: 87,910 total versus 2782 for those with plastic surgery. The corresponding numbers for “wound healing” are 36,359 versus 2703. Reasons for the patent gap between clinical innovations in plastic surgery and number of patents in our field are identified. Clear steps to bridge this gap are delineated that include a step-by-step process for patenting, from idea creation through commercialization. The authors propose “breakthrough to bank,” a framework wherein academic medical centers can create an environment of innovative freedom, establish the infrastructure for technological transfer of intellectual property, and generate a pipeline toward commercial applications. Conclusions: Innovation and inventions are important hallmarks for the progress of plastic surgery. Using a stepwise process, it may be possible to convert ideas into patents.