CAS News: Numeric Search Property on More STN Databases, and New SciFinder Updates

The Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, is an authority on chemical information that produces a number of databases (such as CAS REGISTRY, CAplus, CASREACT, CHEMCATS, CHEMLIST, CIN, and MARPAT) which are invaluable resources for prior art searches in the chemistry and pharmaceutical fields. CAS also contributes to the development of large search systems like STN and SciFinder, which patent searchers can use to locate both patent and non-patent literature prior art. Notable updates have been made to both the STN and SciFinder platforms in the last month, including more numeric property search options on STN and the option to group reaction answers by transformation type on SciFinder. SciFinder also now provides more options for sharing SciFinder plans with other users.

Continue reading to learn about recent news on two important prior art search platforms, STN and SciFinder!

More Free Chemical Search Tools: Materials Project and ChemExper

Here at the Intellogist blog, we’ve discussed free online tools for chemical searches ranging from government resources, like the ever-trusty PubChem and the Chemical Data Access Tool from the EPA, to international tools like the Chinese chemical search tool ChemYQ. Here are two more free chemical search tools to add to the list:

• Materials Project – A collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) that provides users with access to a number of tools for searching and analyzing materials based on their various properties.
• ChemExper (which I originally heard about through the CHMINF listserv) – A free chemical directory created by ChemExper Inc. that allows users to locate chemical products and suppliers.

The Materials Project site provides a number of research support tools that will be useful for patent searchers conducting chemical prior art searches who need to quickly locate detailed information on a particular material. ChemExper will help prior art searchers and chemists quickly locate suppliers for a particular material, and ChemExper also provides a chemical structure drawing tool that greatly enhances the search capabilities of the site.  After the jump, learn about the chemical search tools available on Materials Project and ChemExper!

The Evolution of Free Chemical Patent Searching: The New SureChemOpen

Since SureChem was purchased by Macmillan Publishers Ltd. in 2009, it has undergone a variety of changes that are chronicled in the Major Recent Updates section of the SureChem System Report on Intellogist. In April 2012, the SureChem website announced SureChemOpen, a free chemistry search product that was being launched prior to the release of two subscription search products (SureChemPro and SureChemDirect).  The SureChem website offers a comparison of all three products, and these features are listed for SureChemOpen:

• $0 per month
• Free patent chemistry search
• Search and view patent chemistry and full text
• Search SureChem patents alongside Royal Society of Chemistry journals and ChemSpider
• No data export

Read on to learn more about the new SureChemOpen product, including the coverage, chemical patent search and viewing options, and how you can register to use the portal for free!

The Latest Data Updates on PubChem

The National Institute of Health first released PubChem in 2004, and today PubChem is an important free chemical search platform for patent searchers and other chemical researchers.  According to the “About” section, PubChem allows users to search for “information on the biological activities of small molecules,” and the chemical structures link to other Entrez resources, like PubMed scientific literature. This winter, two new data sources were added to PubChem, and patent searchers looking for prior art in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology fields may find useful data from both resources.

Continue reading for an overview on PubChem and a look at the latest updates to PubChem data coverage!

Search Pharmaceutical Information for Free with DrugBank

How many ways can you search or browse a database of drug information?  The DrugBank website seems to offer almost every possible option for searching and browsing its database of:

6789 drug entries including 1437 FDA-approved small molecule drugs, 134 FDA-approved biotech (protein/peptide) drugs, 83 nutraceuticals and 5167 experimental drugs. Additionally, 4274 non-redundant protein (i.e. drug target/enzyme/transporter/carrier) sequences are linked to these drug entries.

Each drug profile (“DrugCard”) on DrugBank has “more than 150 data fields with half of the information being devoted to drug/chemical data and the other half devoted to drug target or protein data.”  DrugBank is supported by Dr. David Wishart, the Departments of Computing Science & Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, Genome Alberta, Genome Canada, and GenomeQuest, Inc.

DrugBank contains over 6,700 detailed drug profiles, which users can search or browse in 11 different ways.  It must cost an arm and a leg to access this database, right?  Actually, it’s free.  Continue reading to learn all the options for searching and browsing this treasure trove of pharmaceutical information!