Love it or loathe it, the pharmaceutical industry is really good at protecting its intellectual property. Drug companies pour billions into discovering new drugs and bringing them to market, and they do whatever it takes to make sure they have exclusive positions to profit from their innovations for as long a possible. Patent applications are meticulously crafted to keep the competition at bay for as long as possible, which is why it often takes ages for cheaper generic versions of blockbuster medications to hit the market, to the chagrin of patients, insurers, and policymakers alike.

Drug companies now appear poised to benefit from the artificial intelligence revolution to solidify their patent positions even further. New computational methods are being employed to not only plan the synthesis of new drugs, but to also find alternative pathways to the same end product that might present a patent loophole. AI just might change the face of drug development in the near future, and not necessarily for the better.

Many Paths to Progress

In most industries, a patent is a simple concept: come up with a new idea, and if it proves to be novel, non-obvious, and useful, chances are good that a patent will be granted that prevents anyone but the owner from making, using, selling, or importing the covered invention for a certain period of time. The rub to the patent process is that the application must reveal everything about the invention publicly, which means that after the exclusivity period has expired, anyone can profit from the original inventor’s work.

Pharmaceuticals, though, are treated differently. Since it’s relatively easy to reverse engineer a chemical compound using analytical chemistry tools and methods, patents for drugs concentrate on the process used to arrive at the desired endpoint. Most drugs are relatively simple organic compounds whose creation is a long, complicated series of reactions. They’ll often start with a couple of simple compounds, reacted together under just the right conditions to yield an intermediate compound. That product is then perhaps purified before being mixed with a fourth compound, and the process continues. Functional groups are added or subtracted at each step until the final compound is created in sufficient quantity and quality.

Every step in the process is claimed in the process patent application so that the resulting patent is as broad as possible. But it doesn’t stop there. There may be more than one way to skin the synthetic cat, and every single feasible alternative synthesis needs to be covered by the application too. Chemists at pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of effort looking for and plugging these potential patent loopholes.

AI to the Rescue

Both the design of the best, most commercially viable synthesis and the search for loopholes are perfect applications for AI. Syntheses can be broken down into well-defined steps governed by rules that an expert system can rapidly churn through, searching for a path from a known starting point to the desired product. Researchers at the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Ulsan National Institute …read more

Source:: Hackaday