Structural Approach to Assessing the Innovativeness of New Drugs Finds Accelerating Rate of Innovation

Measuring innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is challenging. Counts of new molecular entities (NMEs) approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are commonly used, but this measure only gauges quantity not innovativeness. A new indicator of innovation for small molecule and peptide drugs based on structural novelty is proposed and used to analyze recent trends in pharmaceutical innovation. We show pharmaceutical innovation has significantly increased over the last several decades despite recent concerns over an innovation crisis and find Pioneers (a NME whose shape and scaffold were not used in any previously FDA-approved drugs) are significantly more likely to be the source of promising new therapies. Analysis of the underlying source of structural innovation indicates that scaffolds first reported in the CAS REGISTRY five or less years prior to their Investigational New Drug application (IND) or on scaffolds populated with 50 or less other compounds at the time of IND tend to be the main source of Pioneers. Our analysis also shows a widening structural innovation gap between large pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma) and the rest of the ecosystem even though the number of Big Pharma originated Pioneers has increased.