The Past Twenty Years of Drug Development, Via the Literature

Here's a new paper in PlOSOne on drug development over the past 20 years. The authors are using a large database of patents and open literature publications, and trying to draw connections between those two, and between individual drug targets and the number of compounds that have been disclosed against them. Their explanation of patents and publications is a good one: . . .We have been unable to find any formal description of the information flow between these two document types but it can be briefly described as follows. Drug discovery project teams typically apply for patents to claim and protect the chemical space around their lead series from which clinical development candidates may be chosen. This sets the minimum time between the generation of data and its disclosure to 18 months. In practice, this is usually extended, not only by the time necessary for collating the data and drafting the application but also where strategic choices may be made to file later in the development cycle to maximise the patent term. It is also common to file separate applications for each distinct chemical series the team is progressing. While some drug discovery operations may eschew non-patent disclosure entirely, it is nevertheless common practice (and has business advantages) for project teams to submit papers to journals that include some of the same structures and data from their patents. While the criteria for inventorship are different than for authorship, there are typically tea...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Development Source Type: blogs