Freedom To Operate (FTO)
Freedom to operate study is conducted to verify that whether client can make commercial benefits out of his product or process without infringing on the intellectual property rights owned by others. For this purpose all the active patents/patent applications of that jurisdiction along with active WIPO applications pertaining to the technology are analyzed. The patents/patent applications are analyzed on the basis of the latest claims that are obtained through file wrapper. Through this study client can get to know about "essential patents" and "infringing patents" of that technology thereby avoiding future patent litigation risk.

Patentability Search
Patentability search is conducted to check whether the client's invention is patentable or not. For an invention to get patented it should fulfill following criteria:

Novelty
Non-Obviousness
Utility
Statuary Classes: process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter

For this purpose an invention is judged on the non-obviousness and novelty criteria by analyzing patent and non-patent literature in that technological domain. This study enables client to take decision regarding patent filling and defining scope of claims of the patent for his invention.

Sequence/Structure Search
Sequence/structure search are conducted using STN (Scientific & Technical Information Network) which is an online information network offering current and archive information from over 200 scientific, technical, patent and business databases. Using STN one can search for chemical structures, DNA/RNA/protein sequences in both patent and non-patent literature at high accuracy. Some of the key databases are CAPLUS, DGENE, FSTA, MARPAT and WPINDEX. Sequence/structure search can be used in various IP projects such as freedom to operate, patentability search and validity search.