Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 27, 2026

A Web Tool for Generating High Quality Machine-readable Biological Pathways
Published on: February 8, 2017
SCRIPDB: a portal for easy access to syntheses, chemicals and reactions in patents
Abraham Heifets1, Igor Jurisica
1Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5G 1L7, Canada.
Abstract:
The patent literature is a rich catalog of biologically relevant chemicals; many public and commercial molecular databases contain the structures disclosed in patent claims. However, patents are an equally rich source of metadata about bioactive molecules, including mechanism of action, disease class, homologous experimental series, structural alternatives, or the synthetic pathways used to produce molecules of interest. Unfortunately, this metadata is discarded when chemical structures are deposited separately in databases. SCRIPDB is a chemical structure database designed to make this metadata accessible. SCRIPDB provides the full original patent text, reactions and relationships described within any individual patent, in addition to the molecular files common to structural databases. We discuss how such information is valuable in medical text mining, chemical image analysis, reaction extraction and in silico pharmaceutical lead optimization. SCRIPDB may be searched by exact chemical structure, substructure or molecular similarity and the results may be restricted to patents describing synthetic routes. SCRIPDB is available at http://dcv.uhnres.utoronto.ca/SCRIPDB.
Related Concept Videos
Chemical Reactions
Chemical Reactions Rearrange Atoms into New Substances
A chemical reaction takes starting materials—the reactants—and changes them into different...
Chemical Reactions
The relative amounts of reactants and products represented in a balanced chemical equation are often referred to as stoichiometric amounts. However, in...
SN1 Reaction: Kinetics
However, Sir Christopher Ingold and Edward D. Hughes, who studied the kinetics of various nucleophilic substitution reactions, noticed that a tertiary alkyl halide does undergo a nucleophilic substitution reaction in the presence of a weak nucleophile. While studying the substitution...
E1 Reaction: Kinetics and Mechanism
Predicting Reaction Outcomes
Cycloaddition Reactions: MO Requirements for Photochemical Activation
