Tag: Quiet Breakouts
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One rabbit-gut bacterium, 130 US patents, and a product ladder that climbs from steel-mill smoke to jet fuel, PET plastic, and Gucci perfume. The company is LanzaTech, its cash is nearly gone, and its patent machine just hit record output.
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Histotripsy grants tripled to 12 in 2025, and Michigan plus its $2.25B spinout HistoSonics hold 83% of them. The mechanism is now migrating from liver tumors to the immune system.
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Whey and egg white fell years ago. Casein, the self-assembling micelle that makes cheese stretch and melt, is the hard one, and three US startups now hold 19 granted patents on building it without a cow.
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Of 28 US patents since 2018 on engineered nitrogen-fixing crop microbes, Pivot Bio holds eight, more than anyone. The trick: deleting the gene that tells the bug to stop.
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The two largest US flow-battery patent estates belong to a Japanese cable maker and Lockheed Martin. The pure-play startup that trails them is nearly out of cash.
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A cesium chip-scale atomic clock still costs ,000 and needs a laser. Texas Instruments holds 14 patents on a laser-free replacement that runs on a whiff of stinky gas and 5G-radar circuitry.
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The microneedle was built in 1998 to push vaccines through skin. The company with the most US microneedle patents now runs it backwards — to read glucose — and just won the first FDA clearance for a needle-free sensor.
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One bankrupt company, View Inc., holds 441 US patents on tint-on-command glass and got more the year it collapsed. The survivors quietly switched the chemistry from oxide-on-glass to printable polymer film.
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There are 247 US patents on refrigeration that uses no compressor and no gas. The largest holder is the company that invented air conditioning, and it skipped the magnetic approach everyone reported on.
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A 76-year-old display-glass company, not LG or Toyota, holds the largest US patent position in solid-state sodium batteries — and its cells, made entirely of glass, run from -40 to 200 degrees C.