PEMT: a patent enrichment tool for drug discovery

Drug discovery practitioners in industry and academia use semantic tools to extract information from online scientific literature to generate new insights into targets, therapeutics and diseases. However, due to complexities in access and analysis, patent-based literature is often overlooked as a source of information. As drug discovery is a highly competitive field, naturally, tools that tap into patent literature can provide any actor in the field an advantage in terms of better informed decision-making. Hence, we aim to facilitate access to patent literature through the creation of an automatic tool for extracting information from patents described in existing public resources.

Here, we present PEMT, a novel patent enrichment tool, that takes advantage of public databases like ChEMBL and SureChEMBL to extract relevant patent information linked to chemical structures and/or gene names described through FAIR principles and metadata annotations. PEMT aims at supporting drug discovery and research by establishing a patent landscape around genes of interest. The pharmaceutical focus of the tool is mainly due to the subselection of International Patent Classification codes, but in principle, it can be used for other patent fields, provided that a link between a concept and chemical structure is investigated. Finally, we demonstrate a use-case in rare diseases by generating a gene-patent list based on the epidemiological prevalence of these diseases and exploring their underlying patent landscapes.

PEMT is an open-source Python tool and its source code and PyPi package are available at https://github.com/Fraunhofer-ITMP/PEMT and https://pypi.org/project/PEMT/, respectively.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.