The patent costs include the average fee charged by a patent attorney for the initial draft of a patent application in the Life Sciences area, in addition to all fees and costs charged by a national patent office when interacting with the office or with a patent examiner (‘Office Actions’). Additional costs that may arise from extensive patent applications with a very large number of claims, reductions granted in some countries to small business entities, or due to oppositions, appeals or other corrective actions, as well as patent attorney fees for services after the draft of the initial patent application, are not included by the calculator.

You will be asked to use this tool for a few assignments during our online Intellectual Property course. In these assignments we ask you to work out a patent strategy to protect a medicinal product in multiple countries and to choose the best patenting route according to your needs. After completing your online course, this tool will remain permanently available for you to use.

Our Patent Portfolio Calculator is unique because it calculates the accrued costs for more than twenty national patent offices simultaneously. In addition, you can choose between two different routes for filing your patent : national or international (via the PCT). And you can see the total cost for a given period that you choose, or see the incremental cost for each additional year of protection.

Although the tool cannot substitute the more accurate estimates given by a patent attorney in a real- world setting, it certainly helps you to determine the range of costs that you can expect over the twenty year period of a patent’s life time, and how adding or suppressing certain countries from your geographical scope of protection can change your budget.