Psychedelics, Patents & Porta Sophia
Our mission is to protect the public domain, stimulate innovation, and support good patents to assure psychedelic therapies can one day be available at scale to the people who need them.
What is Porta Sophia?
Porta Sophia means doorway to wisdom. We are a non-profit, curated on-line library that brings together scientific, historical, and cultural information related to psychedelics that protects technologies in the public domain. We help innovators and patent reviewers find that information, called prior art, with one simple search tool.
Watch the video to learn more about issues around patents in psychedelics and how Porta Sophia is working to support good patents in this field.
Good Patents
We created Porta Sophia to support good patents. Patents are granted when an invention is determined to be useful, novel and non-obvious. This is done by assuring no evidence exists that the invention was publicly known or available before a patent application was filed. Called prior art, this evidence can take the form of any reference or document in the public domain including published manuscripts, previous patents, conference abstracts, archival documents, cultural artifacts, and even a thread or post on a blog forum.
When patents are granted in cases where relevant prior art exists but is not successfully found, we run the risk of bad patents. These are inventions that are not actually new, and these patents block access to that which is already part of the public domain. The risk of bad patents is especially high in the psychedelic field, given the historical and cultural factors that obscure prior art related to psychedelics.
A Simple Search Tool
Porta Sophia’s team of scientific and legal experts identify prior art in the field of psychedelics from common and uncommon spaces, as well as relevant patents and patent applications. They bring these two pieces of information together into one simple search tool, presenting the best prior art in a way that is most relevant to the inventions that people are trying to patent.
Anyone working or interested in patents in psychedelics can use Porta Sophia. Patent examiners reviewing patent applications can have easy access to relevant prior art. Innovators can determine if what they are claiming is new or not, saving them time and money. And the general public and any interested parties can use this information to challenge a patent application by making third party submissions, or challenge patents after they are issued.
Our mission is to protect the public domain, stimulate innovation, and support good patents to assure psychedelic therapies can one day be available at scale to the people who need them.
Porta Sophia Patent and Prior Art Workflow
Impact Report
As part of our mission to be transparent, we invite you to check out our 2022 Impact Report to see the work we've done over the last year.
View Our Impact Report