The Lens has assembled amazing collections of free and open datasets of patent documents, scholarly research works metadata and biological sequences from patents, and deposited them in a machine-readable and explorable form.
Note that COVID-19 related patents will not appear yet in those datasets. Patents are typically first published 18 months after filing, so patents targeted explicitly to this new COVID-19 agent may not appear until June of 2021.
However, the dataset is referencing virus and disease are related to the SARS and MERS viral outbreaks over the last two decades. As a result, there is a pre-existing wealth of knowledge to mine that can help in the fight against COVID-19.
Moreover, this dataset is machine and scientist friendly as it can be accessed as JSON and other formats fully machine-readable files.
There might be some exciting work to be done on mapping the ownership and relationship of the existing literature and patents.
April 10, 2020