Overcoming the limitations of chemical structure

The pharmaceutical business has been profoundly hampered by a ubiquitous and unexpected obstacle – the way it draws its chemical compounds. Scientists, patent agents and business decision makers from R&D, safety, and in-licensing are locked into a world of 2D ‘atom and bond’ and Markush representations of the molecular structure of compounds. Biological targets do not recognise a drug’s structural make-up. They respond instead to the properties around the drug that are generated by the structure. We can now generate and compare these property fields and show how they alone eliminate the largest impediments to drug discovery – the time and cost of evaluating activity and the serendipity involved in jumping from one chemical class to another for resolving patent issues, biological cross-reactions, ADMET and alternative clinical applications.