Q: how long does it take to have a patent granted based on the publication date? (lets say for a new toothpaste)
for fda
A:
The publication of a patent application and the examination process are not tied. An application is usually published in the US at 18 months after the earliest priority document (this would include an earlier provisional application) but it could be as early as a few months after filing the non-provisional application or not at all as there are options to override the default process.
Once the application has been published, the door is open for you to look to see what is going on in the USPTO with this application using https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair. Congress has set an expectation that a utility application should issue about 3 years after the non-provisional application was filed. This is not guaranteed and many applications take much longer than that.
A way to obtain a guestimate is to look at several recently issued toothpaste patents and look at the difference between the filing dates and the issue dates. I would toss out continuation and divisional patents from this survey as they start out with some seniority in the system.
The queue to get a new computer operating system examined can be very different than the queue for a new dishwasher feature. So the results vary a great deal depending on what queue the patent application is in, whether the owner seeks to expedite the process, and how many iterations there are of rejections and rebuttals.
I hope that this helps.
Kevin E Flynn
1 user found this answer helpful
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