Deuterated Drugs

Giving credit where due.  Below are two well written articles on the deuteration of drugs.  I have taken parts of the articles that seem pertinent to us, for investment purposes.  The complete articles can be accessed from the Concert Pharmaceuticals website below. 

http://www.concertpharma.com/news/in-the-news/

From: "A decades-old drug technology finally nears it's big breakthrough"

Should Teva get regulatory approval, it would open a market in the “many tens of billions of dollars,” said Roger Tung, whose company Concert Pharmaceuticals Inc. is also developing treatments with deuterium.  “It would show the breadth of possibilities,” Tung, the chief executive officer of Lexington, Massachusetts-based Concert, said in an interview. “Deuterium provides unique properties that cannot be attained in any other way.”

From: "Deuterium switcheroo breathes life into old drugs"

Even champions of deuterated drugs note there are plenty of pitfalls. Thomas Gant, scientific founder of the deuterated drug maker Auspex (he’s no longer with the company) and inventor of many deuterated drug candidates, including SD-809, says most synthetic chemists don’t have a good grasp of how chemical reactions operate in the presence of deuterated reagents or substrates.

“It is actually pretty surprising how many reactions that most chemists wouldn’t think would have an effect on the positions of hydrogens will actually cause quite a bit of randomization and dancing around of hydrogen radicals,” he says. “So you run these reactions expecting it to have no effect on your deuterated drug, and in fact, you can see a pretty dramatic effect in some instances. It’ll essentially spread the deuterium around the molecule” so you don’t have the original compound anymore.

As far as intellectual property is concerned, Gant says, it’s important to know the law. Deuterated compounds are considered new chemical entities and can be patented. But to get a patent, he explains, “you have to have actually done the chemistry, produced the deuterated compound, shown the spectra, shown deuterium incorporation rates, and shown biology to demonstrate a perceived benefit.”

It’s not unusual for pharmaceutical companies to include deuterated versions of original drugs in their boilerplate wording for patents. “This is something that companies routinely do to scare off people who don’t understand patents,” Gant says. “People think that the deuterated compounds have been covered. But they haven’t been covered because they haven’t been made and they haven’t been tested. So it might be written in the general description, but it doesn’t actually cover the application of deuterated compounds.  
Thank you for reading.