ChEMBL

So, our cheap-skate super villain - Marcus Schtrukter - who's on a budget, as would fit these times of global austerity; could destabilise our chemical patent system in a simpler and far cheaper way. I mean, who has the money to spend on a secret lair nowadays? Even in developing economies labour isn't as cheap as it once was, the cost of cement is just sky-rocketing, the staff want iPhones, and they spend way too much time on twitter. Assembling a team of henchmen/women, is not easy - don't believe me? Just type "henchmen" into LinkedIn, and there's not a lot. The world is just full of social media mavens nowadays, unprepared to do evil, well any evil that involves getting their own hands dirty. Some numbers to back this up - for me, with my current LinkedIn network there's 112 henchmen and 2,935,294 social media people. Even if you recruited all of the skilled henchmen in the world, what sort of efficient lair could you run with only 112 staff.

So for this cheap version of world patent disruption - you just tell the world you've calculated GBD-46, have it on a large server farm somewhere, and that you're ready to check novelty of chemical structures as a service for the world. You just need a fancy building like the one above, some nice business cards, and an Internet presence, and an AWS account. It's just that you haven't really done any enumeration - remember, super-villains aren't like readers of the ChEMBL-og and would not worry about always telling the truth.

Your patent checking website, would just simply echo back the query (if it was chemically sensible), and say "yeah, that's in there, it's not novel". Now the smarter users would probably say "But how do I know it's in there?" It's pretty simple to rapidly enumerate a large set of compounds around a seed, using a simple rule set, just return these as nearest neighbours, and it looks like you really do have a database of every compound ever possible. To provide a veneer of credibility, you could offer the entire database for download, and of course the ftp site would just deliver an infinite stream of random numbers following a gzip header, for a download that either fills up the recipients disk, or never finishes.