Aquaculture and Fish Health

How SalmoClinic secured a granted patent for its fish-health technology and built a foundation to protect what comes next

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Granted patent secured from a single Patentia engagement

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Existing protected inventions now backed by a repeatable process for the next generation

About

Salmoclinic is a Chilean fish-health company founded in 2018 and based in Puerto Varas, in the heart of the country's salmon-farming region. It operates the Owürkan, the first purpose-built Fish Treatment Vessel of its kind, delivering swim-through therapeutic baths that treat sea lice and gill disease while degrading antiparasitic residues before the water returns to the sea. The company serves several of Chile's largest salmon producers and is developing a pipeline of new health technologies, including an immersion vaccine and adaptations for land-based aquaculture.

Industry

Aquaculture and Fish Health

Company size

Small and medium enterprise

Founded

2018

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"Patentia has been a game-changer. We have significantly accelerated our IP protection and innovation pursuits, enabling us to focus on delivering sustainable aquaculture solutions."

Hans Kossmann

Founder & CEO at Salmoclinic

THE COMPANY

A specialized innovator competing on technology

Salmoclinic occupies an unusual position in the salmon industry. It is not a producer. Its entire value rests on proprietary technology: a continuous swim-through bath system, delivered aboard a custom vessel, that treats fish while degrading the chemical residues that conventional treatments release into the sea.

That technology competes in a market dominated by large animal-health multinationals with substantial legal and patent resources. For a company of Salmoclinic size, the inventions themselves are the competitive position. Protecting them is not an administrative task. It is the difference between holding a defensible advantage and watching a larger player file first.

The challenge was capacity. Founder Hans Kossmann had developed genuinely novel technology over years of research, but confirming whether each invention was patentable, searching the global prior art, and preparing applications to a standard a patent office would accept required specialist resources that an enterprise of Salmoclinic's scale does not keep in-house. Each opinion from outside counsel carried a cost measured in thousands of dollars and a timeline measured in weeks, before the company knew whether an invention was worth pursuing at all.

The challenge

Knowing what is worth protecting, before spending to find out

The decision that gates every patent is the hardest one to make without help: is this invention novel enough to protect, and if so, on what claims.

Answered the traditional way, that question is expensive. A prior art search and a patentability opinion from outside counsel can cost thousands of dollars and take weeks, and the company often pays that cost only to learn that an invention is not defensible as conceived. For a small team funding its own research, that risk shapes behavior. Inventions that might be worth protecting go unexamined because the cost of finding out is too high relative to the chance of a clear answer.

Salmoclinic needed a way to reach that answer quickly and affordably, so the decision to file or not could be made on evidence rather than on the cost of obtaining it.

"What mattered was knowing where we stood before spending. We could see which parts of the invention were defensible and move forward with confidence, instead of paying to find out."

Hanks Kossmann

Founder & CEO at Salmoclinic

The Solution

From invention to granted patent

SalmoClinic brought one of its core inventions to Patentia to answer that gating question directly.

Patentia ran a semantic prior art search across more than 165 million patents, then a patentability analysis that evaluated the invention claim by claim against the closest references, applying the same novelty and inventive-step reasoning a patent examiner uses. Rather than a binary verdict, the analysis returned a clear position on which claims were defensible and where the application needed to be shaped to survive examination.

With that foundation in place, the application was drafted with the prior art already mapped, so the claims were written around the findings rather than tested against them afterward. The complete application, claims, specification, drawings, and abstract, was prepared to filing standards and handed to counsel for review.

The invention proceeded to a granted patent.

The Results

A protected invention, and a repeatable process for the next one

A single granted patent matters on its own. What it represents for SalmoClinic matters more.

The company's research pipeline extends well beyond its current vessel. It is developing an immersion booster vaccine against SRS, one of the costliest diseases in Chilean salmon farming, and adapting its treatment-and-degradation approach for land-based recirculating systems. Each of these represents a potential invention, and each carries the same question SalmoClinic faced before: is it novel, is it defensible, and is it worth the cost of filing.

What changed is that the company now has a repeatable, low-cost way to answer that question before committing budget. Validating an invention and reaching a filing-ready draft through Patentia costs a fraction of the traditional process in both time and money. For an enterprise that competes on the strength of its technology, that turns IP protection from an occasional, expensive decision into a routine step it can apply to every promising idea the lab produces.

Chile is the world's second-largest salmon producer, and its industry faces constant disease pressure and growing scrutiny over chemical and antibiotic use. Sustainable health technology is exactly what the market needs, and exactly what is worth copying. By lowering the cost and time required to validate and protect each invention, Patentia lets a small, research-driven company defend what it builds against competitors with far larger resources.

"As a smaller company, our advantage is the technology we develop. Being able to protect it quickly and affordably, and to do that for everything we build next, changes what we can take on."

Hans Kossmann

Founder & CEO at Salmoclinic

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