Ophthalmology Research: An International Journal

Aims: To investigate, for 13 aldose reductase inhibitors that had been in development for diabetic cataract, whether patent documents could provide earlier dissemination of knowledge to the ophthalmology community than peer review papers.

Methodology: Searches for intellectual property disclosures were conducted in our internal database of ophthalmology patent documents, and were supplemented by online searches in the public Espacenet and Google Patents databases. Searches for peer review papers were performed in Pub Med and Google Scholar, and in our internal database of machine-readable ophthalmology publications.

Results: For sorbinil, tolrestat, fidarestat and GP-1447 patent documents clearly preempted the peer review literature in terms of data-supported information on potential effectiveness in diabetic cataract, typically by 7-17 months. For alrestatin, zenarestat, zopolrestat, indomethacin, and quercitrin academic journals were clearly first to properly report this therapeutic utility, preempting the corresponding patents by 6 months to several years. For ponalrestat, risarestat, epalrestat, and lidorestat claims of utility in diabetic cataract were first made in patent documents, but with insufficient or incomplete support.

Conclusion: Our results suggest that including patent documents in the routine monitoring of newly disclosed knowledge could significantly improve the comprehensiveness of the literature base in ocular pharmacology, and has the potential to alert researchers to emerging drug candidates earlier than reports in the peer review literature.