SureChEMBL in 2026: an open database of chemical and biomedical annotations from the patent literature
Nicolas Bosc, Tevfik Kizilören, Eloy Félix, Muhammad Arsalan, Carlos A Moreno-Vélez, James Webster, Ricardo Arcila, Melissa F Adasme, Idil Ismail, Michał Nowotka, Yury Zavarin, Maria P Magariños, Maria J Falaguera, Anna Gaulton, Anne Hersey, Andrew R Leach, Barbara Zdrazil, Noel M O’BoyleAbstract
The patent literature is a major source of scientific and technical information for drug discovery, often disclosing chemical structures, biological targets, therapeutic indications, and structure-activity relationships before they appear in the scientific literature. However, patent documents are difficult to analyse at scale because of their volume, legal and technical language, heterogeneous formats, and frequent use of nonmachine-readable representations for chemical structures. Since 2015, SureChEMBL has provided open access to chemical information automatically extracted from patent documents. Here, we present a major redesign of the SureChEMBL resource. The updated platform is built on a modern architecture and includes redesigned extraction, chemistry registration, search and data-delivery workflows, together with large-scale reprocessing of the historical corpus through a unified standardization pipeline. SureChEMBL also introduces automatically generated biomedical annotations for genes, proteins, diseases, and mechanisms, linking patent chemistry to biological context. The resource currently contains 122 million patents, 44 million chemically annotated documents, 31 million chemical structures, and 1 million biomedical entity annotations, accessible through https://www.surechembl.org/, an API and the downloadable Bulk Data.