The Innovation and Technology Support Office (ITSO) through its Manager, Assoc. Prof. Michael Jorge Peralta, MSc, MSPT, Ll. M., conducted a seminar-workshop about the Fundamentals of Intellectual Property and Patent search to the BS Pharmacy students of the University of South Australia (UniSA), who were part of the Study Abroad Program of the Office of International Relations and Programs. The seminar took place on February 12, 2020.
The objectives of the activity are: to improve IP awareness among the Pharmacy students of UniSA; and to capacitate them to perform simple patent search for their research projects. Assoc. Prof. Peralta gave the definitions and the characteristics of the different IP rights and how they are applied to their respective fields. Then he oriented them on the different free search engines in conducting patent search to determine the novelty and inventive step of their projects. This will assist them to avoid ‘re-inventing the wheel’ and thus their projects might just fall within patentable subject matter. He gave them a hands-on experience on how to the navigate the free patent databases and to read patent documents.
One of the objectives of the ITSO is to improve IP awareness sharing their expertise and train faculty, students, and researchers in matters of IP, patent searching and patent drafting. This would eventually lead to more technologies that would be commercialized and transferred to industry partners for public use and at the same time may earn royalties to the inventors as their incentives to create more.
