What is it about?
There is intense interest in measuring the process of drug research and development (R&D). The best known of these is counting the number of new drugs approved by the FDA every year (http://cdsouthan.blogspot.se/2015/01/the-drugs-of-2014-in-pubchem.html). However these are the end products of many years of development. The research phase, certainly in the first few years, is largely hidden from public view. This paper takes a look at the outputs of research as colllated by a commercial database from the literature and patents derived from drug R&D globaly. This provides a unique insight into how these organistions progress their efforts, particullarly for individual drug targets.
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Why is it important?
Our analysis takes some different approaches to tracking research outputs that complement other reports. There is back-story (http://cdsouthan.blogspot.se/2013/11/tracking-big-small-data-from-drug.html) we recieved a mention on the In the Pipeline blog (http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/11/11/the_past_twenty_years_of_drug_development_via_the_literature) and we also made Nature News (http://www.nature.com/news/seven-days-15-21-november-2013-1.14203). For those without acess to commercial databases I followed up a few ways of comparable target tracking using only public sources (http://cdsouthan.blogspot.se/2013/11/drug-target-time-tracking.html)
Perspectives
There are a lot of good reviews around on drug R&D productivity (some of which we have cited) but they dont generally make cheerful reading. Notwithstanding our metrics show the sheer scale of pubished reasearch outputs that may not be generally appreciated. These offer a massive scope of starting points for others to exploit in both the academic and commercia sectors. As a collaboration between the scientists involved in the production of a database and users, this work with GVKBIO was a useful experience and could serve as a model for future endeavours.
Dr Christopher Southan
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Tracking 20 Years of Compound-to-Target Output from Literature and Patents, PLoS ONE, October 2013, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0077142.
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