Free Chemical Patent Searching

Here's some good news for open (free) access to chemical information. A company called SureChem was trying to make a business out of chemical patent information, but had to fold. They've donated their database to the EMBL folks, and now we have SureChEMBL. At the moment, that link is taking me to the former SureChem site, but no doubt that's changing shortly. This will give access to millions of chemical structures in patents, a resource that's been hard to search without laying out some pretty noticeable money. This isn't just the database dump, either - the software has been donated, too, so things will stay up to date: SureChEMBL takes feeds of full text patents, identifies chemical objects from either the in-line text or from images and adds 2-D chemical structures. This is then loaded into a database and is searchable by chemical structure, so you can do substructure, similarity searching and so forth - all the good things you'd expect from a chemical database. This chemical search functionality is unavailable from the public, published patent documents, and is really essential for anyone seriously using the patent literature. Oh, and the system does this live, so as patents are published, they are processed and added to the system - the delay between publication and structures being available in SureChEMBL is about a day when converted from text, and a few days when converted from image sources. Chemical Abstracts, Reaxsys, and the others in that business should take...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs