“Lost Chemistry” Database to Aid Pharma Research

Selected Organic Reactions Database (SORD) and Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs) are offering the first version of a compound and reaction library as a commercial database that is available for use with ACD/ChemFolder or ACD/Web Librarian.

The availability of the database provides researchers with a source of validated chemical reaction data that was previously difficult, if not impossible, to access.

Now placed in an electronic format, and collected in a single source, these chemical structures and reaction data are fully searchable through a variety of structure and text-based searches. The first commercial version of the database contains several thousand compounds that are obtained from a host of academic institutions.

In the last 50 years, more than 50 million chemical reactions have been performed successfully in academic research. Yet only about 10 million of these reactions can be accessed through major commercial chemical reaction databases.

It is estimated that nearly half of the remaining 40 million reactions have been documented in unpublished theses and dissertations, leaving a source of lost, yet validated, chemical reaction data. "This is what we call lost chemistry," says Dick Wife, CSO of SORD.

SORD’s initial focus has been to gather those chemical reactions that are relevant to pharmaceutical research. The company seeks active input from pharmaceutical companies who will use the database to ensure that the format is entirely suitable for data mining.

SORD also makes limited versions of the database freely available to academic institutions that contribute content to the database, and where authors have given permission to make their work public.