Celebrating the 20 years of Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents

This month celebrates the 20th anniversary of Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents. Behind this slightly esoteric title, EOTP has for two decades offered a bird’s eye view of the latest advances in the discovery of therapeutically promising molecules. During this period the scientific and regulatory landscapes in drug R&D inevitably evolved, the number of peer-reviewed publications worldwide increased steadily and the Expert Opinion journals changed hands. Yet, I think it is fair to say that EOTP’s distinct approach and relevance have remained unaltered.

Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents’ launch aimed at filling a gap in the life science literature by explicitly including patents within the scope of its review articles. Key to a legal system designed to promote innovation, patents provide exclusive rights to the inventor in return for the full disclosure of the invention to the public. In the specific context of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, this makes patents a particularly valuable source of information for medicinal chemists and other researchers involved in drug discovery. In effect, to protect their promising compounds, companies reveal them at an early preclinical stage and for the first time in patents. Not only do patents divulge the novel compounds, but they also show which are deemed to show clinical potential and offer insights into the competitors’ research programmes.

Patents are not alien to researchers in the industry. However, despite being largely freely available and easily searchable, patents present the information in a somewhat cryptic way. They don’t follow the rules of scientific writing and extracting the relevant knowledge can be time consuming. Patents are long documents worded in legal jargon by specialist attorneys. They often cover dozens of compounds, only a few of which are of genuine interest. These compounds need to be reconstructed from generic structures and of course, they need to be put into context with other related patents as well as the scientific literature.

EOTP’s review articles provide a dramatic shortcut to the essential information by summing up the important scientific content of dozens of patents, putting it into a wider perspective and, of course, expressing the authors’ own critical opinion. They answer fundamental questions such as “what are the structural types of inhibitors? “ and “who are the major players in the field?,” but also go beyond and suggest which compounds are likely to progress to the clinic. In that respect, Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents’ reviews offer exceptional added value.

I know from many first-time authors that preparing a manuscript for the journal is a surprisingly taxing undertaking. I can but acknowledge this and I would like to thank our authors for their hard work. The constant increase in EOTP’s usage testifies that the drug discovery community clearly values such efforts. Moreover, the readership is very likely to continue to grow as EOTP has eventually been accepted for indexing on Medline last year – an unfortunately tardy development.

Last year, Expert Opinion’s editorial team gathered feedback from the advisory boards and our readers. This 20th volume of EOTP should reap the first benefits of this consultation. First, the abstract’s structure has been redesigned to better reflect the content of the article. Second, an ‘article highlights’ box has been added to guide the reader through the main points of the paper. Third, EOTP will start publishing one to two themed issues in each volume. The first one, guest-edited by Dr Herbert Kirst from our Editorial Board, will cover antibacterials and will be due later this year.

I expect in 2010 the acceleration of another more gradual addition to the journal. The biotechnologies are now fully integrated to the pharmaceutical area and bear novel promises of therapeutic advances. Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents will logically increase its coverage of biologicals to echo this trend.
I hope this agenda meets our readers’ expectations and that EOTP will remain, above all, a useful resource to professionals in the field.

Joris Roulleau
Senior Editor