Minesoft article featured in IPPro India

Patents have become increasingly important to the pharmaceutical industry. A new medicine can now exceed $2.6 billion to develop successfully, therefore pharmaceutical patents are crucial to give much needed protection to new compounds so that corporations can recoup their development costs.

Companies in the pharma sector need to acquire tools that help interrogate global chemical patent data, to minimise losses on projects and identify viable white space for investment. In a recent article for IPPro India, James Cooper and Daniel Lowe of Minesoft explain how companies can effectively use Chemical Explorer to take advantage of CNER technology and add chemical structure search capability throughout the full text of millions of patent documents.

 “As R&D costs within the pharmaceutical sector continue to increase, having a range of tools available to help identify and discard non-viable drugs can be the difference between a healthy profit margin and serious losses on a company’s balance sheet.” Explains James Cooper, Support Executive at Minesoft. “Chemical explorer is an excellent addition to the range of tools available, helping to identify entities that exist within the patent literature so that pharmaceutical companies can either reach out for licencing opportunities, identify gaps in the market to exploit or abandon early stage trials earlier – should a competitor manage to file against a particular compound first.”

At Minesoft, we are continuously working to enhance our suite of patent solutions. An upcoming addition for Chemical Explorer will move one step closer to making Markush searching possible. Although creating a Markush structure with which to interrogate the database remains unavailable, it is now possible to retrieve chemicals described using Markush notation. This is done by searching a specific molecule and, if a core structure including one or more R-groups referenced in the text matches the queried molecule, then the document will flag as a hit. This advancement will allow users to accumulate more relevant hits with their searches without sacrificing the specificity of their queries, keeping ‘noise’ to a minimum.