Exuberance or Bubble? Study of Nano-Based Herbal Medicine Patents in the PR China

The growing economic and therapeutic importance of Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) has prompted the governments of East Asian countries to develop it into an industry. The current research on the application of nanotechnology in CHM is deemed a new field of study. This article focuses on the issue of overly broad patent applications and assignments in the PR China by examining a case in which a patentee successfully registered more than 900 nano-based CHM patents in China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), all of which were based on the same preparation process. This article further shows that the proliferation of nano-based CHM patents in China is due to the illusion of biomedical technological progress and that the current irrational exuberance for patents not only is a bubble that will burst, but also presents barriers to innovation and invention in the emerging biopharmaceutical ind ustry and the nano-based CHM market.