In July I posted on the development by ChemAxon of their Markush Editor that allows chemists to create, and edit complex Markush structures. At the time I mentioned that in addition to building the Markush Editor system ChemAxon would be integrating it with a new version of their computer assisted chemical information extraction tool, ChemCurator. At the time the company thought that this functionality would be available by the end of the summer. Keeping to this schedule ChemAxon launched the tool on September 30th, and discussed it at length during their US Users Group Meeting held recently. Quoting from the press release announcing the release ChemAxon describes the combination of ChemCurator with Markush Editor:
ChemAxon, a leader in providing chemistry software solutions and consulting services for life science research, launches ChemCurator, an application to extract chemical information and generate Markush structures from documents.
Markush structures are essential in securing an organizations intellectual property, however generating and understanding Markush structures is a difficult and time consuming process. Moreover, extracting and understanding chemistry text and images, such as exemplified structures within patent documents, is an unmet need.
By combining ChemAxon’s chemical text mining and Markush technologies within an intuitive application, researchers and information professionals can easily see chemistry in documents, understand their context and work directly with structures to build and explore Markush libraries quickly.
To demonstrate this functionality several presentations, and case studies were provided during the Users Group Meeting including Zhengwei Peng of Merck who suggested the big scope potential of Markush technology in R&D and IP, nicely points out how valuable this is, and how it all fits together in these tools. There was also a nice edge case from Greg Landrum of Novartis on Markush for capturing scientists’ IP on lead series evolution.
Abstracts and slides from these presentations can be found at the links below:
The needs and challenges related to in-depth analysis of patent molecular spaces to support drug discovery projects – Zhengwei Peng (Merck)
Construction of a vast virtual chemical space powered by ChemAxon’s Markush Search Platform and its utility in molecular design – Zhengwei Peng (Merck)
What else can you do with the Markush cartridge? Tracking chemical series for project teams – Gregory Landrum (Novartis)
Working Effectively with Complex Markush Structures – Árpád Figyelmesi (ChemAxon)
https://www.chemaxon.com/library/2014-usugm/working-effectively-with-complex-markush-structures/
For those of you who are interested in chemical patents, and Markush structures in particular there will be a free webinar, and demo covering ChemCurator, and ChemAxon’s Markush technology on Thursday Oct 4th at 4pm CEST. Sorry for the short notice, but registration can be accomplished at the following link – https://www.chemaxon.com/events/webinars/chemcurator-computer-assisted-patent-curation-and-analysis-tool/
In conjunction with the ChemCurator release ChemAxon also announced a collaboration with IFI to populate the new tools with data from the CLAIMS Direct database:
IFI CLAIMS® Patent Services, the leading producer of global patent databases, analytic solutions and innovative web services, and ChemAxon, a leading provider of chemical informatics software for the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, announced a collaboration to deliver IFI’s global patent data over ChemAxon’s recently introduced ChemCurator software platform.
ChemCurator is a computer-assisted patent curation and analysis tool designed specifically for the pharmaceutical industry. With an IFI CLAIMS Direct subscription, ChemCurator users can automatically import trusted global patent data into the application. Chemical structures are recognized and can then be extracted and annotated from within ChemCurator. IFI’s CLAIMS Direct subscribers will be able to use their existing subscription as their ChemCurator patent data source.
The full text of the press release announcing this collaboration can be found here.
Converting text from patents into computer readable chemical structures, especially Markush representations has been a long established need, and exceedingly difficult problem for practitioners in the field of chemical information. With the development of additional tools for chemical curation, and Markush manipulation the ability to create collections, and visualizations of the available patented chemical space are becoming a reality.
