Westbrook & Burley 2019 — 88% of 210 new FDA molecular entities 2010-2016 facilitated by PDB structures

Westbrook & Burley's 2019 Drug Discovery Today paper "How Structural Biologists and the Protein Data Bank Contributed to Recent FDA New Drug Approvals" documents that 5,914 PDB structures provided structural coverage for 88% of the 210 new molecular entities approved by the U.S. FDA between 2010 and 2016 across all therapeutic areas. More than half of those structures were published and distributed openly more than ten years before drug approval, demonstrating the long-tail compounding pattern the open-data multiplier in C-0032 describes.

This complements E-0050 (which reports 100% of 34 new low-molecular-weight, protein-targeted antineoplastic agents approved 2019-2023 relied on PDB data, per Subramaniam et al. 2024) and establishes the pattern across a broader window: the open-PDB substrate has been the structural basis for the majority of new FDA drug approvals across more than a decade, not just for the most recent cancer-drug cohort. The decades-long lag from structural deposition to therapeutic deployment is itself the argument for preservation horizon (C-0036): the data must persist long enough for the downstream compounding to materialize.