ACD/Labs and SORD Work to Capture "Lost Chemistry"

The Selected Organic Reactions Database (SORD) is tapping into the vast reserves of chemical reaction information from academic research that has been locked away for half a century in theses and dissertations at universities all over the world.

Using proprietary technology provided by Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., (ACD/Labs) millions of these reactions will be processed into an electronic format that is searchable by a variety of parameters and accessible over the internet to users worldwide.

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 It is estimated that nearly half of the remaining 40 million reactions have been documented in unpublished theses and dissertations, leaving a rich source of lost, yet validated, chemical reaction data.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

The initial focus of SORD is on one million chemical reactions that are relevant to pharmaceutical research. In doing so, SORD has the active input from pharmaceutical companies who will use the database to ensure that the format is entirely suitable for data mining. "SORD is also about Open-Access for the academics who supply us with their reaction data lying dormant in theses and dissertations," adds Wife. "We enjoy their full support in bringing this lost chemistry back to life."

Antony Williams, VP and Chief Science Officer for ACD/Labs, said, "We see the SOR Database quickly becoming a valuable new resource of chemical reaction data for synthetic organic chemists to data mine. The efforts of SORD are likely to have a major impact in academia and on the way that chemistry will be performed in chemical and pharmaceutical companies. We are delighted to be working with SORD on this exciting program, and look forward to a long term relationship."

ACD/Labs technology currently provides academics with access to the SOR Database over the Internet. The SOR Database is exposed online utilizing ACD/Web Librarian technology and will be made available shortly on the ChemFolder Enterprise platform. In the Strategic Alliance, the full range of ACD/Labs proprietary tools will be used and further developed to be optimized for the purpose of facile Data Mining.