Why is use of the public literature and patents important to drug discovery?
MT. There are many aspects of public literature that facilitate scientific advancement and can lead to important progress for drug discovery. Scientific literature is a record of observations about nature and nature’s events. Consider the most direct situation, where a journal article reports a specific biological activity of a series of structures, measured in a bioassay environment. Those observations, and in fact the data, may have immediate application to a drug candidate design and directly influence the discovery process. Knowing from the published literature that a compound or group of compounds has a certain activity (or no activity) in an assay system directly enables a more advanced hypothesis to be tested or provides a scientist with a context from which to create a more likely successful agent. Consider also a less direct situation, where a now elapsed patent reports a natural product with aspects of a desired drug effect. In rather simple terms, the adage: “Those who canno
