SureChem chemical patent data donated to EMBL-EBI

Digital Science is donating the SureChem collection of more than 15 million chemical structures from world patents into the public domain through the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). 

The company says that this 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'.

According to the company, '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, which was Digital Science’s very first portfolio company, extracts chemical structure data from the full text and images of patents. This is said to make it easier to check whether a newly-developed drug or other product is actually novel.

Nicko Goncharoff, head of knowledge discovery at Digital Science and founder of SureChem said: '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. By placing this collection into the trusted hands of EMBL-EBI, we’re opening up an entire new class of life science data to the public that has previously been locked behind paywalls, and inaccessible for data mining. We couldn’t think of a better home for SureChem, anywhere.'

SureChEMBL joins a wide array of connected life-science informatics resources at EMBL-EBI, which offers freely-available molecular data.