Building structure-activity insights through patent mining

One gap in current patent-mining practice is the lack of tools to build SAR knowledge. Here, we report a novel technique that enabled us to derive useful SAR information from the exemplified structures of a series of patents. In our approach, exemplified chemical structures were extracted from patent documents. They were grouped into structural series based on similarity and binding mode, after which the R-group table was generated. By analyzing R-group usages over time, we were able to build insights into SAR of a structural series, even though the biological activities were not available.