Medicinal chemistry - when do you need to start considering IP?

From the chemist point of view, how soon should you start considering IP when identifying small molecules from a high throughput screen? The answer is as soon as possible. During the exploratory synthesis phase, knowledge of the literature (both scientific literature and the patent literature) will direct your next steps. This can help eliminate compounds very early in the process and enable a focus of resources on developing novel compounds first.

This element is often overlooked by academics until later inthe process. Industry has many resources (and likely a dedicated team) to monitor IP, but there are a number of resources and tools available to academics to do this patent searching and data mining - SciFinder is an example.

Are there other resources out there open to academics to use to find this information?