Sequence Read Compression Algorithm Patents: Who Files, What They Claim, and Where the Field Is Still Open

One assignee leads the ranking with 32 records, well ahead of the fifth-placed entrant at 3 and the tenth at 2, across an 18-company ranking. That gap indicates an early, broad filing position rather than a fragmented field, though 17 other companies and inventors still hold active families. Anyone doing freedom-to-operate work in this space should start with the leader's portfolio before looking at the long tail.

Filings peaked at 23 records in 2021 and fell to 1 by 2024, a decline the evidence states as -96% over that three-year span. That drop is real for the years it covers, but publication typically lags filing by about 18 months, so 2025 and 2026 counts are still incomplete and should not be read as proof the field has gone quiet. A fair re-read of the trend needs another year or two of publications to land.

The dominant class is G16B, bioinformatics, appearing on 83.8% of the 74 records in scope, followed by G06F, digital data processing, at 50.0%. Dedicated coding and code-conversion class H03M covers only 10.8%, with smaller overlaps into DNA measurement (C12Q, 14.9%), digital transmission (H04L, 5.4%), diagnosis and surgery (A61B, 4.1%), pictorial communication (H04N, 4.1%) and material analysis (G01N, 2.7%). Because a record can carry multiple classes, these shares add to more than 100%, and the pattern shows claims framed mostly as bioinformatics workflow rather than as generic compression method.

The densest claim territory sits in G16B bioinformatics workflow claims at 83.8% of the 74 records, so a narrowly workflow-framed claim is more likely to run into prior art there. The comparatively thin H03M coding class, at 10.8%, and H04L transmission class, at 5.4%, suggest more room for claims framed around the compression or transmission mechanism itself rather than the genomic pipeline around it. Any filing strategy should also weigh receiving-office choice, since US, EPO and PCT together account for the bulk of the filings recorded here.

This Koninklijke Philips filing, published 2023-11-23, claims a method for storing a genomic dataset in a file structure paired with an information metadata structure. The metadata structure covers annotation tables with user permissions, analytics information for verifying data reproducibility, access history for traceability, and linkage information connecting the annotation table to the dataset. It is a data-structure and storage claim rather than a compression-algorithm claim, so it constrains genomic file architecture design more than it constrains a standalone codec.