ACS Spring 2024: First Time Disclosures

The Drug Hunter team is piloting a new series highlighting notable disclosures in the patent literature to provide our readers a timely and scientifically flavorful synopsis of therapeutic targets being actively pursued, emerging industry breakthroughs, and fascinating chemical matter. Here we highlight 12 patents published in December 2023 that piqued our interest, and compiled a searchable table comprising key information from more than 180 additional patents of potential interest to drug hunters. If you have any suggestions on how to make this more useful, please let us know!

The final set of Molecules of the Month for 2023 is out, and now it’s time to nominate your favorite molecules for 2023’s Molecules of the Year! Nominees should have either been first disclosed in 2023 or had a major new update in 2023 (e.g. clinical trial readout, publication, business transaction, approval). The molecule must have a [...]

Among the small molecule highlights in January’s news were a $100M+ Series A for a PARP1 + PI3Kα-focused company, clinical data with an SLC inhibitor for PKU, a 5-HT2C superagonist for seizures, and a NK1,3 dual antagonist for women’s health. A novel anti-obesity agent from phenotypic screening also made headlines, and the close of a major acquisition may bring relief to the industry. You can read about these notable scientific highlights and more below.

Momelotinib is a JAK inhibitor approved by the FDA in September 2023 for treating myelofibrosis. Last year, the molecule’s co-inventors, Andrew Wilks and Christopher Burns, gave a Drug Hunter Flash talk about the development of this drug with a fascinating mechanism of action.

In celebration of the molecule’s advancement, here we recap their brilliant story, including Wilks’ discovery of the JAK kinases and how he gave them their name, and the long, sometimes fraught journey of momelotinib through several companies before its acquisition and commercialization by GSK.

The 2024 EFMC-ISMC joint conference in Rome was centered around two first time disclosure sessions which revealed the structures and discovery stories of seven drugs covering a range of hot targets and modalities. This article captures the key highlights from the sessions, detailing the structures and targets of the novel molecules presented, including Novartis’ HIF-2α inhibitor and their folate receptor-targeted RLT, as well as the novel chemical matter of AstraZeneca/Mitsubishi Tanabe’s NLRP3 inflammasome inhibitor and a first-in-class MKK4 inhibitor for liver regeneration.