Digital Science, a division of Macmillan Science & Education, is donating the SureChem collection of more than15 million chemical structures from world patents into the public domain through the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). It is the first time a world patent chemistry collection has been made publicly available, marking a significant advance in Open Data for use in drug discovery. This transfer will give researchers around the globe access to a vast new source of medicinally relevant compounds related to the curing of human disease.
SureChem, developed by Digital Science, extracts chemical structure data from the full text and images of patents. This makes it easier to check whether a newly developed drug or other product is actually novel. Previously held within commercial systems and inaccessible to most researchers, this important life science data source is now freely available from EMBL-EBI as SureChEMBL.
SureChEMBL joins a wide array of connected life-science informatics resources at EMBL-EBI, which offers a comprehensive source of freely available molecular data. This transfer opens the door to integrating disease and drug-target data in more meaningful ways, enhancing links between chemical structures and other biological data and their discoverability through the scientific literature.
Researchers working in the public and private domain are invited to explore these data at www.surechembl.org.
