Those among our colleagues, observers, and competitors who routinely follow this blog or our tweets at @hmpharmacon will probably wonder why we are not posting much concerning our THIRDSPACE patent knowledge management project. Well, the reason is that we are working hard on two fronts. One is acquiring, indexing and annotating the textual and chemical data for the ocular pharmacology pilot module: we are rapidly narrowing a gap around the millennium, and we are preparing to extract chemistry information. The second reason is strategic – we are evaluating concepts for the integration of THIRDSPACE and the Discontinued Drug Database project.
We at H.M. Pharma Consultancy believe that a fresh look at drug repurposing strategies is badly needed. While algorithm-based and structure-driven theoretical considerations have resulted in some interesting leads, especially in neglected fields of medicine (e.g., see here, by Sean Ekins and the good people at Collaborative Chemistry) there are now already too many companies trying variations of the same concepts.
As I have pointed out here on June 1, 2011 we intend to use the most up-to-date data dredging and analysis capabilities to mine open source data, and then apply expert-based pharmacological knowledge and – yes, heresy! – good old intuition to arrive at new leads. The decisive difference is that we acquire open data from sources that remain largely unexploited. THIRDSPACE is only one element in these efforts – but it is an important one because whatever patent database vendors may tell you they are not opening up patent information in a way that can be directly used in generating drug repurposing leads. Now we are about to integrate another component, our Discontinued Drug Database (D3) which this blog has discussed here. There are hundreds of potential leads to be found among these abandoned molecules – which could be approved drugs but also clinical candidates that have fallen on the wayside: after all, Phase II is the Great Eliminator in drug development.
The D3 project is in its early stages, but this means that we can steer it towards integration with THIRDSPACE without having to care much about legacy formats. We see both sources to go under the same XML-based umbrella sooner or later. Meanwhile we chop away at what is still missing, and we refine these tools for internal use. Stay tuned for news!