All of us need new, improved medicines. Drugs that present incremental advantages (usually referred to as “me too” medicine) are good, however actually revolutionary therapies are even higher. However, how does one separate how “novel” a remedy is? Is there a strategy to quantify this?
In truth there may be. One manner to do that is predicated on the remedy’s molecular construction. For occasion, the Tanimoto distance measures the the fraction of chemical options which are shared by the 2 chemical compounds. Nikolova et al. 2004 summarizes this method which is calculated as follows:
Krieger, Li and Papanikolau 2022 use this methodology to quantify how drug improvement for novel medicine has rather more optimistic informational spillovers on the drug improvement than incremental medicine. This paper supplies an instance of an utility of Tanimoto distance beneath.
Using the Tanimoto distance as a measure of novelty, the authors discover the next:
…novel drug candidates are much less prone to acquire FDA approval however are based mostly on extra priceless patents. Consistent with a easy mannequin of expensive exterior finance, we present {that a} optimistic shock to companies’ web value leads companies to develop extra novel medicine. This means that even massive companies could behave as if they’re threat averse, lowering their willingness to funding in probably priceless radical innovation.
You can learn the total paper right here.