Chemical structures transferred to public domain
8 Jan 2014 by Evoluted New Media
Patented chemical structures are to be transferred to the public domain, giving researchers access to a new source of highly relevant compounds related to curing human disease.
SureChem – developed by Digital Science – extracts data from the full text and images of patents, making it easier to check whether a newly developed drug or product is actually novel. The system is being transferred to the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), marking the first time such a large collection of world patent chemistry structures – over 15 million – has been made publicly and freely available.
“Patents are the foundation of high-tech enterprise and innovation and form the basis of the knowledge economy. We hope making chemical patents more discoverable in the public domain will considerably speed up the identification of promising molecules,” said John Overington, Head of Chemical Biology at EMBL-EBI.
“This new source of data will be a major boost to translational research and the discovery of novel bioactive molecules. By putting all this data together in a structured way with other EBI resources, we can help increase competitive innovation.”
The new system – now named SureChEMBL – can be found at www.surechembl.org, and will open up data which was previously held in commercial systems and inaccessible to most researchers.
“Our mission is to give researchers better tools and services and from the start Digital Science has preferred solutions that support Open Science and Open Data communities whenever possible,” said Nicko Gincharoff of Digital Science. “By placing this collection into the trusted hand of EMBL-EBI we’re opening up an entire new class of life science data to the public that has previously been locked away behind paywall, and inaccessible for data mining. We couldn’t think of a better home for SureChem anywhere.”
The transfer will facilitate the integration of disease and drug-target data in more meaningful ways, enhancing links between chemical structures and other biological data and their discoverability through scientific literature.
