Drug & Clinical Pipeline Explorer

3. How to Use the Interface

The application is structured into three primary tabs that update dynamically as you apply filters:

A. The Filter Bar (Global Controls)

The filters at the top of the application apply across all tabs:

• Search Input: Search by compound name, research codes (e.g., MK-1234), brand names, ChEMBL ID, or ClinicalTrials.gov NCT number.
• Target/Mechanism Filters: Filter by targeted gene symbol (e.g., EGFR), biochemical action (e.g., Inhibitor, Antagonist), or cellular pathway category.
• Sponsor/Developer Filters: Type-ahead filter on the normalised sponsor name (legal-entity spelling variants folded together).
• Regulatory Designations: Tick any combination of First-in-class, Orphan Drug, Breakthrough Therapy, Fast Track, Accelerated Approval, QIDP, Withdrawn and Black-box warning. Ticking several requires all of them at once — Orphan and Breakthrough narrows the set rather than widening it. Every designation a drug holds is listed in its detail panel regardless of what is ticked here.
• Drug Class (USAN stem): Type-ahead over the international drug-naming stems — -tinib (tyrosine kinase inhibitors), -ciclib (CDK inhibitors), -vir (antivirals), and 664 others. Present on 7,150 of 12,813 drugs, making it the highest-coverage class signal in the dataset. Matching is case-insensitive over both the stem and its definition, so kinase works as well as -tinib. Drugs with no stem assigned are excluded while the box has text in it.
• Route: Oral, parenteral or topical. A drug can have several and matches under any of them. In pooled mode every salt form’s routes count, since route belongs to the formulation rather than the molecule.
• Chemistry: Prodrug (inactive as administered, converted to the active form in the body) and Natural product (structure derived from a natural source rather than being fully synthetic). Ticking both requires both.
• Status Toggles:
  • Drug Status: Two independent axes. Approval (approved / not approved, with an approval-date range and a “withdrawn only” option) and Progress (Advancing, Active at peak, Fell back, No active development, No trial data). Because they are independent you can ask for combinations a single status could not express — for example approved drugs that have fallen back. Also here: a last-activity range, and “has an ongoing trial at Phase N”.
  • Trial Status: Filter by individual trial status (Active, Completed, Stopped, Expanded Access, or Unknown).
• Data Aggregation Toggle (Pooled vs. Per-Formulation):
  • Pooled Mode (Default): Aggregates salts, esters, and prodrugs into a single parent active moiety (e.g., sildenafil citrate and sildenafil are pooled under “Sildenafil”). This prevents duplicate counting and shows the true clinical evidence weight.
  • Per-Formulation Mode: Views every registered salt form, solvate, and derivative as a distinct individual record.

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B. The “Drugs” Tab (Compound Inventory)

This tab shows a table listing all clinical-stage compounds matching your active filters.

• Stage (Highest Phase): The highest phase of clinical development the drug has ever entered. Phase 4 indicates an approved status.
• Trials Count: Consolidates all linked trials. A custom hover-explained role bar breaks down these trials into their functional roles:
  • Teal: Investigational trials on an interventional study (this counts toward the drug’s core trial-evidence total).
  • Purple: Reference comparator trials.
  • Grey: Background / backbone regimen trials.
  • Slate: Observational / Expanded Access trials (not counted toward core totals).
• Last Activity: The date of the most recent CT.gov trial update for this drug, signaling whether development is active or dormant.
• Detail Panel (Clicking a Drug): Clicking on any drug row opens a side-drawer or detailed profile including:
  • Chemical structure rendering (SMILES/InChIKey) and physical properties (MW, LogP, Polar Surface Area).
  • Comprehensive list of regulatory approvals and designations across FDA, EMA, and KEGG.
  • Curated target, action mechanism, and Reactome pathway lists.
  • Historical timeline of clinical trial involvement.
  • Official safety/withdrawal warnings.

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C. The “Trials” Tab (Study Details)

This tab lists every individual drug-trial link matching your criteria. It is powered by the local DuckDB database, enabling instant search and filtering.

• Trial ID (NCT): Clicking this opens the official clinicaltrials.gov record page.
• Role & Regimen: Shows whether the drug was the investigational subject, comparator, or background backbone in this study, and whether it was administered as a monotherapy or part of a combination regimen.
• Status & Bucket: Displays the current CT.gov trial status alongside its normalized lifecycle bucket (Ongoing, Completed, Stopped, Stalled, Expanded Access, Unknown).
• Why Stopped: Surfacings the curated reason why a trial was terminated early (Efficacy/Safety, Administrative, Regulatory, or Unclear) alongside the raw text description filed by the sponsor.
• Results & Outcomes: Lists documented primary and secondary endpoints with their actual measured values (where available).
• Eligibility Criteria: Summarizes age ranges, gender requirements, and healthy volunteer rules.

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D. The “Charts” Tab (Visual Analytics)

Generates high-resolution visualizations based on your filtered active cohort:

• Clinical Funnel: Attrition as drugs transition from Phase 1 to approval, scoped to drugs with a resolved outcome so unfinished programmes do not inflate it.
• Success Rates: Historical transition rates within a chosen entry-date cohort. Read the caveat in section 6 before quoting these numbers.
• Approval × Progress: The two independent axes crossed — including “Approved · Fell back”, an approved drug whose development has retreated, which no single-status model can express.
• Development Timelines: Duration from first-in-human trial to regulatory approval.
• Why Trials Stop: Scientific failures (safety/efficacy) vs. administrative halts (logistics, recruitment, business decisions). This is a trial-level view: one stopped trial does not mean the drug was discontinued.