2011 (to date) USANs by molecular class
So, we're about half way through the year, and just update the July 2011 USANs - here is a graph of the USAN molecular class for all names published this year. This set of USANs, will, on average, suffer about 80% attrition and the survivors will be launched in ca. three or four years time. (See previous posts for some details on this). So, this 'year class' is a snapshot of types the drugs to come in 2014-2015.
There are 83 drugs in this 2011 set (actually, I need to find out the official dating of USAN assignment, since some published in 2011 are assigned 2010 dates). All the supporting data for this is contained in the blog posts, and it took about five minutes to assemble from this source, but if you'd like a spreadsheet mail me. Small molecules are in various shades of blue, Biologicals in various shades of green, or pink or purple; Protein type biologicals are subdivided into a series of intuitive classes (see earlier posts on drug taxonomy for details).
It's interesting to note that the majority of the molecules are still synthetic small molecules, two thirds in fact, while only a quarter are 'biologicals'. Looking at quite a lot of data like this makes me query, a little, the well forecasted dominance of biologicals; what really is the data that shows a forthcoming dominance of biologicals, on what timescales, etc. Of course, there is a big difference between economic dominance, and simple counts of novel molecular entities (NME); and biological therapies are more arguably premium priced. However, I think the NME is a pretty good metric for underlying innovation. There are also some interesting differences and similarities in attrition between small molecules and biologicals - small molecules are directed to a different set of targets to biologicals, and many of these targets are already clinically validated. Currently biologicals are directed against more unvalidated targets, and so attrition risk is different between small molecules and biologicals. Our initial analyses suggest that the overall attrition is similar between these two sets (so it's not likely that although a quarter of the class of 2011 USANs are biologicals they will all survive to market.
I have a beach holiday coming up soon, on the delightful south Hampshire coast, and plan to do some more analysis on these USAN datasets, assuming there is wifi on the beach....