New Patent Search Capability For Chemical Compounds In Progress At WIPO

The World Intellectual Property Organization is working on an extension to its patent search systems to include specific searches for chemical compounds. The system is expected to be operational by July 2016.

Intellectual Property Watch met with Christophe Mazenc, director of the WIPO Global Databases Division, to learn more about this new project and how it will work.

Christophe Mazenc

Intellectual Property Watch (IPW): During the recent 23^rd session of the Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP), you gave a presentation of an extension to PATENTSCOPE, the WIPO patent database. Could you explain what the project is about?

Christophe Mazenc: Chemsearch is an extension to PATENTSCOPE that we are aiming to put into place next year with the goal of enabling basic search for chemical compounds.

IPW: What need is Chemsearch seeking to address?

Mazenc: To easily search chemical compounds which are published as part of patent applications and granted patents.

Those chemical compounds usually appear in the text of patent applications or granted patents, in the title, in the claim, in the description and abstract. They also appear as embedded images, in the description section and in the claim section. They are many different ways to represent compounds, which makes them difficult to search.

To be exhaustive, you need to put all the different symbols, and all different drawings. So the idea is to facilitate the search for those compounds.

IPW: How will it work?

Mazenc: The system will only search for complete structures, it will not try to look for sub-structures of compounds. The idea is that we will recognise chemical compounds in patent text and also from embedded drawings. We will standardise all the representations to what is called an Inchikey.

Inchikey is a technical representation, invented by chemists to uniquely identify chemical compounds. Inchikey is derived from the structure of the compound.

For example, the Inchikey for N-(4-hydroxyphenyl) acetamide, more commonly known as paracetamol, is RZVAJINKPMORJF-UHFFFAOYSA-N.

The user will be able to enter a name, for example an INN (International Nonproprietary Names assigned by the World Health Organization), or the chemical structure if the user has it, or any name that he/she has. The system will translate this name to the Inchikey. Then it will be possible to search all the documents for this Inchikey.

The software will also let the user draw the chemical formula he/she wants to search, and in reverse will be able to convert drawings into Inchikeys.

Then it will be a classical PATENTSCOPE search, with a result list from where you can access documents.

IPW: Can you tell us in a few words what is PATENTSCOPE?

Mazenc: PATENTSCOPE is WIPO’s public, free, patent search system. A first version of PATENTSCOPE was set up in 2002, but in 2006 the system evolved. Before 2006, we had only PCT [Patent Cooperation Treaty] applications in the system, and now we are adding national collections.

It is a long process, but we already have 40 authorities, including the United States, China, Japan, and the European Patent Office. We have 50 million patent applications, including granted patents, in the system.

IPW: Where does the project stand now?

Mazenc: The work is currently being implemented by the specialized firm Infochem, which won an international tender for the contract, under WIPO supervision, and we are aiming to deploy the service in July 2016.

IPW: Thank you.

Image Credits: WIPO Flickr