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Macmillan Science & Education company Digital Science is releasing more than 15m patented chemical structures from world patents into the public domain. It is the first time a collection of its type has been opened so widely.
The publisher is releasing the SureChem collection through the European Bioinformation Institute (EMBL-EBI), making the data available to researchers around the world, helping them to develop new drugs and medicines. It said the move was "a significant advance in Open Data for use in drug discovery", giving researchers "access to a vast new source of medicinally relevant compounds related to the curing of human disease".
SureChem, which has been developed by Digital Science, analyses patents and extracts the chemical structure data, allowing researchers to check whether their own creations are unique.
Nicko Goncharoff, head of SureChem at Digital Science, 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."
John Overington, head of chemical biology at EMBL-EBI, said: "Patents are the foundation of high-tech enterprise and innovation and form the basis of the knowledge economy. We hope that making chemical patents more discoverable in the public domain will considerably speed up the identification of promising molecules."
He added: "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.”