Introduction

Biologics, such as peptides, enzymes, antibodies, synthetic proteins and nucleic acid-based gene therapies, have great therapeutic potential for human diseases where traditional small molecules can’t help. 

Although these kinds of therapeutics are relatively new, the benefits of biologics are already recognized by scientific society, pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies — there are about 300 FDA-licensed biologics products and ~25% of new therapies approved by the FDA in 2020 were biologics (1,2). Furthermore, the biologics market was valued at USD 303.20 Billion in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 606.81 Billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 9.06 % from 2021 to 2028 (3).

Do you already develop biologics or have an interest in expanding into this field? 

Staying on top of recent advances in biologics, including tracking which biological sequences have been patented and tested for disease treatment in pre-clinical and clinical settings, is increasingly difficult as research in this field broadens. That’s where Dimensions Life Sciences & Chemistry (Dimensions L&C) comes in — with its next-generation tools, Dimensions L&C can save you valuable time tracking and extracting relevant biological sequence information from patents for your R&D and competitive intelligence insights.

Dimensions L&C has a uniquely enriched data set with context-sensitive semantic and biological sequence annotations and normalised and enriched metadata, enabling you to quickly discover knowledge and generate actionable insights from millions of scientific documents. Data is derived from over 120 million publications and millions of grants, publications, patents and clinical trials. From this patent data, comprising over 25 million patents, you have access to over 103 million individual biological sequences.

How you can use Dimensions L&C to further your research and save time

With the help of Dimensions L&C you can easily search for exact or similar nucleotide sequences (DNA, RNA) or amino acid, protein, and peptide sequences in our sequence BLAST index. Dimensions L&C’s index contains 90M+ individual nucleotide and 13M+ protein sequences extracted from patents. These sequences are linked to 300M+ and 60M+ patent sequence references, respectively.

How the Sequence search works:  you can simply paste the plain text sequence or a sequence in FASTA format into the search field, specify “expect threshold” if needed and hit “BLAST”.

From the results, you can explore similar sequences retrieved by the system and gain information about the sequence length, the sequence identity, gaps and more. These sequences can also be exported in FASTA format outside of the platform for further analysis.

These figures show how you can explore similar sequences and their alignment with your query sequence.

Being able to locate the sequence from patents is only part of the story — you also need to be able to see the context in which a sequence was indexed. In Dimensions L&C you can quickly identify all the patents related to a sequence of interest, enabling you to explore the context and all related semantic concepts — such as diseases, genes and proteins, drugs etc —to quickly generate valuable insights.

These figures show a patent where a sequence of interest was indexed with detailed semantic annotations.

Finally, you can use Dimensions L&C to export biological sequences from patents you have collected; our dedicated tool “Sequence Exporter” allows you to quickly bulk-export sequences from many documents at the same time.

The Sequence Exporter tool

To learn more about sequence search in Dimensions L&C, watch our dedicated how-to video.

Don’t miss the opportunity to accelerate R&D and get competitive intelligence insights by automating your tracking and analysis of patents with biological sequences! Get in touch if you would like to learn more about how Dimensions L&C can benefit your organization.

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Sources

1.  Fact Sheet: FDA at a Glance 
2.  2020 FDA drug approvals
3. Biologics Market Size By Product (Monoclonal Antibodies, Vaccines, Cellular Based Biologics), By Application (Autoimmune Diseases, Cancer, Infectious Diseases, Rare Diseases), By Geographic Scope And Forecast