In the pharmaceutical world, chemical structure search is crucial yet underrated. It brings together scientific accuracy and strategic intelligence to help R&D teams safeguard the novelty and viability of their innovations.
What Happens When Chemical Structure Search is not comprehensive?
When this search is handled superficially, problems start surfacing at the most inconvenient stages. Prior art that should have surfaced early may appear during examination, and seemingly novel compounds can turn out structurally familiar. Entire R&D directions may need to be rethought when a critical analog family is missed. The complexity of Markush claims, inconsistent database encodings, and automated tools misinterpreting variables create serious search vulnerabilities. These issues cause incomplete chemical structure search results that quietly derail strategy, timelines, and budgets.
How Companies Should Conduct Chemical Structure Search?
A robust and exhaustive structure search, therefore, is never just a quick substructure query. It’s a careful blend of domain expertise, algorithmic precision, multi-database exploration, and rigorous validation. It requires decoding complex claims by hand when needed, standardizing structural variations so nothing slips through, refining queries to capture hidden analogs, and reconciling results across multiple platforms to build a truly complete picture. This layered, expert-driven approach empowers pharma teams to make clear decisions across pipeline planning, filings, strategic evaluations, or freedom-to-operate assessments.
If you’d like to explore how this strategic approach comes together in real-world scenarios, and understand how we helped a global pharma company increase their search recall from ~40% to over 95% and reduce their search turnaround time from 3–4 weeks to 1–2 weeks.
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