Here's an article outlining the importance of biotechs protecting their intellectual property. For anyone wondering, how Prima stacks up, they stack up well. As of June 2011, the patent portfolio under management contains 40 granted patents and 12 applications under prosecution.
Here's the pertinent sections of the article:
----------------------------------------- Intellectual Property Of A Biotech: An Analysis
For biotech investors, there is little as frustrating as digging through mounds of medical journals and browsing websites in an attempt to interpret clinical trial results, trial timelines and potential drug market values. Presented clinical data can be confusing, complicated, biased and even contradictory at times. Biotech companies often purposely delay both positive and negative data for their own purposes and may only report a portion of the data from their trials. Potential marketing value for a drug can also be elusive with differing patient targets for specific indications with phrases often seen such as "for breast cancer patients with overexpression of HER2 +2 or +3" or other such jargon that not only makes researching the marketing potential difficult, but it also makes it difficult to perform "apples to apples" comparisons among similar drugs.
The deeper a biotech investor digs for data and marketing potential the more questions than answers can often be found. Some of the most difficult research an investor can undertake is in a biotech's patent portfolio protecting its valuable intellectual property. This property not only increases the market value of the company owning it, but it also protects the drugs' future marketability as it can reduce or prevent competitive products from draining sales from the drug's future and prevent "copycat" drugs from finding loopholes and directly competing with the company. The money and years invested in any drug truly drains a biotech's finances. In order to survive, they must start marketing or licensing their final product at some point in order to survive. When/if "The FDA Approves Drug XYZ" for the biotech is finally announced, the company must be confident in its product's return on investment or the millions of dollars and years of research could be in vain for the company. An analysis of the varied patents a biotech company possesses is necessary for those wishing to predict the company's expected profitability in the event its product is ultimately cleared for marketing.
ImmunoCellular Therapeutics is a development phase biotech with a phase II trial for newly diagnosed glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) ....... .....However, investors should also be taking note of the additional press releases as pertaining to patent protections applied for as well as those awarded. The July 10th announcement of the Japanese patent allowance for IMUC's multi-antigen approach to fighting brain cancer is a sure sign that the company is taking its intellectual property protection very seriously. It is this patent protection that will protect the value of the company's pipeline and will also attract Big Pharma suitors for M&A and licensing purposes. ..... .... many [patents] are here to protect the company's worldwide license in some of these cases, greatly multiplying the potential financial benefit that will could evident for licensing and marketing purposes.
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