Trends in covalent drug discovery: a 2020-23 patent landscape analysis focused on select covalent reacting groups (CRGs) found in FDA-approved drugs.

Introduction: Covalent drugs contain electrophilic groups that can react with nucleophilic amino acids located in the active sites of proteins, particularly enzymes. Recently, there has been considerable interest in using covalent drugs to target non-catalytic amino acids in proteins to modulate difficult targets (i.e. targeted covalent inhibitors). Covalent compounds contain a wide variety of covalent reacting groups (CRGs), but only a few of these CRGs are present in FDA-approved covalent drugs.

Areas covered: This review summarizes a 2020-23 patent landscape analysis that examined trends in the field of covalent drug discovery around targets and organizations. The analysis focused on patent applications that were submitted to the World International Patent Organization and selected using a combination of keywords and structural searches based on CRGs present in FDA-approved drugs.

Expert opinion: A total of 707 patent applications from >300 organizations were identified, disclosing compounds that acted at 71 targets. Patent application counts for five targets accounted for ~63% of the total counts (i.e. BTK, EGFR, FGFR, KRAS, and SARS-CoV-2 Mpro). The organization with the largest number of patent counts was an academic institution (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute). For one target, KRAS G12C, the discovery of new drugs was highly competitive (>100 organizations, 186 patent applications).