The drug class of 2014

Around this time of year there is much interest and comment from the pundits concerning the previous year’s drug approvals. Team member Chris Southan has a history of picking out aspects of the PubChem entries on his own blog and has duly done so for 2014  so these are coupled posts that pick out different aspects.  As you might expect,  within the team we follow up on  all drug approval announcements during the year and re-tweet those of particular interest.  Since we have usually already captured the agent as an advanced development candidate, we then update our entry to “approved”. We may also add new links,  such as Phase 3 results, major trade names,  PDB structures and cross-pointers to parent/salt splits between INNs and USANs.

What you can see in the table at the bottom of this post are the 2014 approved drug identifiers, both for the 30 PubChem CIDs and 24 GtoPdb SIDs. There are number of aspects to highlight for our own entries.

1) As explained in FAQ our current capture priorities neither extend to anti-infectives nor to large protein biologicals (other than antibodies).
2) We take diagnostics and imaging probes on a case-by-case basis. In this set we had already curated florbetaben because of its beta amyloid binding data but we have not added the Lumason contrast reagent since it has no reported pharmacology.
3) From the 41 approved drugs, eight of our entries do not have a PubChem CID. This is  either because they are proteins or the peptide has not been submitted as a chemical structure (but our entries specify the amino acid sequence).   However,  these eight do have SIDs (pointing back to us)  because we submit them to PubChem.
4) For the approved antibodies note that our entries uniquely include the quantitative target binding data where we can find this in papers and occasionally patent-only results. It thus complements the sequence records and other information you can find in the IMGT entries that we link to.
5) Note we handle drug mixtures by cross-pointing but in this set they were all anti-infectives and so are not included.
6) With the various exclusions described above we have 17 small-molecule entries for the approved drugs of 2014.
7) Updates for some of these entries will appear in the next database release.

FDA list of New Molecular Entity and New Therapeutic Biological Product Approvals for 2014