Illuminating the druggable genome through patent bioactivity data.

Area of Science:

• Drug discovery and development
• Medicinal chemistry
• Bioinformatics

Background:

• Patent literature is an underutilized resource for bioactivity data.
• The Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) project provides a classification for prioritizing targets.
• The ChEMBL database curates bioactivity data from various sources.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a method for prioritizing life science patents for bioactivity data.
• To identify patents containing data on potent small molecules targeting less-studied genes.
• To augment the ChEMBL database with novel bioactivity information.

Main Methods:

• Utilized 3.7 million life science patents from the SureChEMBL database.
• Applied annotation and filtering pipelines based on IDG classifications.
• Manually curated selected patents for incorporation into the ChEMBL database.

Main Results:

• Identified a substantial number of patents with quantitative bioactivity data for understudied targets.
• Discovered previously unreported bioactivity data in the patent corpus.
• Quantified the added value of patent data in terms of identified targets.

Conclusions:

• Searching patent literature complements traditional peer-reviewed sources for drug discovery.
• Patent data provides valuable insights into small molecules and their activities against novel targets.
• Enhanced ChEMBL database now includes new small molecules and bioactivity data from patents.