Pharmaceutical researchers used to check a molecule's patents one database at a time, and now they type the name.
Blocked in the EU by 2 in-force patents. The molecule itself is free.
Earliest clear date · 2031-09-18
The freedom-to-operate picture for one molecule, and the date it turns.
The situation
How this used to work
Before a generics developer starts work on a molecule, they have to know every patent that touches it. Not just the substance: the formulation and the manufacturing process too, across Europe, the United States and everywhere else they intend to sell.
This is the most fundamental input into the decision to build a product at all. Launch into a patent you missed and you are not late, you are in court.
It was done by hand. One specialist, whose job this was, going product by product through the public patent databases. It took man-hours per molecule, and the work reset with every new candidate.
What we built
The system
Freedom-to-operate evaluation by molecule. Type a name, and the patent landscape comes back classified, with expiry dates, legal status per patent, who already has approval, and a five page report underneath it.
There is no language model anywhere in it. The classification is rules over public data, and the sources are all free and public. It never touches a private credential.
That is a deliberate choice, not a shortcut. A pharmaceutical R&D lead can check every line of this against the source. That is the only reason it is worth anything to them.
How it works
The pipeline, step by step
The molecule has more than one name
The FDA Orange Book is the first lookup. When the international name does not match the American one, a second public database resolves it and the lookup retries. Paracetamol becomes acetaminophen and the search continues instead of failing.
The first lookup misses. The second one is what makes the third work.
Combination products are left out on purpose
A molecule that only appears inside a combination gets dropped rather than merged in, because folding those patents into a single-molecule picture produces a landscape that looks complete and is wrong.
Every patent resolves to its strongest claim
Substance beats formulation, formulation beats method of use. It matters because the type of patent is what decides whether there is a way around it, and a substance claim usually means there is not.
| Covers | Status |
|---|---|
| FormulationEP2521723 | In force |
| SubstanceEP1427415 | In force |
| ProcessEP2757897 | Opposition |
| Method of useEP3170826 | Revoked |
| FormulationEP2140867 | Lapsed |
Type, expiry and live legal status per patent, not a list of numbers.
One patent at a time, visibly
For each blocker, the European family is pulled from the patent office one patent at a time. That is slower than firing them all off at once, and it is the right call: the user watches a counter move instead of a spinner, and nothing times out silently halfway through.
Granted is not the same as standing
The legal events for every family member are read back into a real state: in force, granted, opposition pending, revoked or lapsed. A revoked patent on a list of blockers is not a detail, it is the difference between a no and a yes.
Five pages, including the limits
The last page is the methodology and what the tool does not know. Supplementary protection certificates were explored and deliberately left out, because the free data is too noisy to be trusted and fake precision is worse than an honest gap in front of someone who does this for a living.
Page five is the one that says what the tool cannot see.
What changed
The result
The engine ran on real data on 8 June 2026 and was live the next day.
A fifty molecule run came back with no errors and forty nine of fifty found. The one miss was a combination-only product, excluded exactly as designed.
It says approved, never marketed. An approval on file is not a confirmed launch, and the tool never claims a market is open when what it actually knows is that somebody has permission to enter it.
The stack
Engine
- Python 3
- standard library only
- no LLM
Sources
- FDA Orange Book
- NIH RxNorm
- EPO OPS
- INPADOC legal status
- Espacenet
Delivery
- Vercel serverless
- vanilla HTML/JS
- Chrome headless print-to-pdf