Patent Attorneys

We provide both internal and external counsel with powerful tools to help you explore and evaluate the IP landscape around an internal lead series or your competitors’ products and claims. Whether you are seeking to work with your scientists to avoid known IP issues and strengthen a filing, or collaborating with clients to work around or challenge a competitor’s IP position, Versaphor’s tools can help you answer key questions:

Internal

How can I design around a particular IP issue?

FieldStere enables you to identify bioisosteric replacements for parts of your molecules so that key elements of the scaffold can be preserved while a problematic section of the molecule is changed. Because FieldStere evaluates molecules with replacement moieties on the basis of their Fields, not their structure, it can find a wider, more structurally diverse range of potential bioisosteres than other methods. To make the results easy to understand, FieldStere finds and clusters its suggested bioisosteres by chemical scaffold, making it easier to see the different chemotypes that are likely to have the desired activity.

Which existing compounds (however structurally diverse) have the same activity as my lead?

FieldScreen allows you to search through databases of millions of known structures (including from Thomson Reuters' WDI and many other commercial compound databases, as well as your own collection) to find known but structurally varied molecules that are likely to have the desired activity. This enables you quickly to evaluate the complete range of structures that are capable of exhibiting the same biological activity regardless of their structural similarity to known lead structures.

External

How can I find obvious filings and demonstrate their similarity to protected IP?

FieldScreen and FieldStere both predict (much more accurately than Markush) bioisosteric compounds that are likely to share the same activity even though they have different 2D structures. This allows you to compare newly filed structures against existing IP and compound databases and use this information to evaluate the obviousness of new chemical entity claims.

How can I maximize the protection around my lead series?

By finding and being able to protect multiple bioisosteres (even those that are apparently highly structurally diverse), more of the chemical space that has the desired activity can be protected. This makes it harder for fast-follower competitors to patent-bust your client's new IP and leads to stronger patents, fewer ‘me-too’ competitors and a longer market exclusivity period. In turn this creates significantly more value in the patents.