Influenza antiviral therapeutics

In this review we conducted a landscaping study of the therapeutic anti-influenza agents, limiting the scope by exclusion of vaccines. The resulting 2800 patent publications were classified into 23 distinct technological sectors. The mechanism of action, the promise and drawbacks of the corresponding technological sectors were explored on comparative basis. A set of quantitative parameters was defined based on landscaping procedure that appears to correlate with the practical success of a given class of therapeutics. Thus, the sectors not considered promising from the mechanistic side were also displaying low value of the classifying parameters. The parameters were combined into a probabilistic Marketing Prediction Score, assessing a likelihood of a given sector to produce a marketable product. The proposed analytical methodology may be useful for automatic search and assessment of technologies for the goals of acquisition, investment and competitive bidding. While not being a substitute for an expert evaluation, it provides an initial assessment suitable for implementation with large-scale automated landscaping.