All of us need new, improved medicines. Medicine that present incremental advantages (usually known as “me too” medication) are good, however really revolutionary therapies are even higher. Nevertheless, how does one separate how “novel” a therapy is? Is there a method to quantify this?
In actual fact there’s. A method to do that is predicated on the therapy’s molecular construction. As an example, the Tanimoto distance measures the the fraction of chemical options which are shared by the 2 chemical compounds. Nikolova et al. 2004 summarizes this strategy which is calculated as follows:
Krieger, Li and Papanikolau 2022 use this methodology to quantify how drug improvement for novel medication has way more constructive informational spillovers on the drug improvement than incremental medication. This paper supplies an instance of an utility of Tanimoto distance under.
Utilizing the Tanimoto distance as a measure of novelty, the authors discover the next:
…novel drug candidates are much less more likely to acquire FDA approval however are based mostly on extra beneficial patents. Per a easy mannequin of expensive exterior finance, we present {that a} constructive shock to corporations’ internet value leads corporations to develop extra novel medication. This means that even massive corporations could behave as if they’re threat averse, lowering their willingness to funding in probably beneficial radical innovation.
You’ll be able to learn the total paper right here.
