Drug discovery is no longer the province of pharma – Introducing SureChemOpen

Today, thanks to our text mining team, users looking for better patent chemistry search have a free means of doing so. Announced in line with the American Chemical Society’s spring meeting in San Diego, Calif., SureChem (our patent chemistry product line here at Digital Science) has introduced a new open interface for researchers needing a more effective means of searching patent literature.

“SureChemOpen” is a free layer added to SureChem’s product line, building off the technology of their flagship product. To date, sophisticated patent search has been largely walled off through costly enterprise software most commonly associated with pharmaceutical research. However, drug discovery is no longer the province of pharma, as increasingly patents are being integrated more into other pockets of the research ecosystem. SureChemOpen is an important first step in making this sort of search more accessible to other members of the research community. 

The underlying technology works to make patent chemistry less painful and less reliant on brittle string matching and text string searches by allowing chemists to search how they think – in chemical structures – the interface allowing users to actually *draw* chemical structures and sift through the database that way (ask a chemist, this is big). As seen in other pockets of life science research, structures or entities can often be classified under a myriad of names, inadequately linked to contextual information (if at all), all further exacerbating the sifting problem, and as a result, slowing down research dramatically. 

There are other free chemistry databases, most notably resources like ChemSpider from the Royal Society of Chemistry and PubChem from the US National Library of Medicine. Whilst complimenting these resources, SureChem is unique in that its the only free patent chemistry database searchable by chemical structure, each structure linked directly to the patent literature. This not only maps to how chemists think, but makes for an incredibly powerful resource and way of sifting through the wealth of information tucked away in patents.

SureChemOpen is the first part of a re-launch of the SureChem product line, with additional products planned to roll out over the coming months. For more information on the release, see our press release. And do let us know what you think of SureChemOpen. We’d love to hear your thoughts.