Elsevier MDL and NIH link PubChem database and DiscoveryGate® information platform

San Leandro, CA—March 21, 2006—Elsevier MDL and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have linked databases to make it easier and quicker for academic, government, pharmaceutical and other researchers to obtain more comprehensive information, improve decision making and support discovery breakthroughs. The NIH’s freely available PubChem database of small molecule data, designed to support links to outside chemical information resources, is now cross-indexed with the Compound Index hosted on Elsevier MDL’s DiscoveryGate® platform.

“Now, researchers can immediately tell if information related to a specific chemical compound exists in the other system,” said Steve Bryant, director of the PubChem project. “From DiscoveryGate, links connect researchers directly to the relevant information from PubChem. Likewise, researchers using PubChem can link to additional information in DiscoveryGate [appropriate licenses required for accessing DiscoveryGate data sources]. This integrated information provision improves the scientific community’s ability to rapidly conduct thorough research.”

Lars Barfod, CEO of Elsevier MDL, added: “The value of DiscoveryGate is focused information, relevant to specific research questions, from a network of indexed and linked data sources. This collaboration with the NIH to index PubChem extends the scope of available content, and will help researchers find critical information while avoiding unnecessary, repetitious searches of multiple systems or data sources.”

The online DiscoveryGate® platform (www.discoverygate.com) provides access to integrated scientific content from databases, journal articles, patent publications and reference works, from information providers including Elsevier, Thomson-Derwent, FIZ CHEMIE, the U.S. FDA, Prous Science and Thieme. With the addition of 5 million chemical structures from the PubChem database, the MDL Compound Index (the master list of substances included in DiscoveryGate data sources) now exceeds 14 million unique chemical structures.

The PubChem database (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) emerged from the NIH effort to catalog information on the biological properties of small molecules. The new indexing in PubChem gives scientists with appropriate DiscoveryGate licenses the ability to move from biological data in PubChem to extensive bioactivity, chemical sourcing, chemistry, synthetic methodology and Environmental, Health and Safety data in DiscoveryGate data sources.

About NIH
The National Institutes of Health (NIH)—The Nation’s Medical Research Agency—includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. The PubChem database, a component of NIH’s Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative, is a comprehensive database of chemical structures and their biological activities being developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine at NIH. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.

About Elsevier MDL
Elsevier MDL provides informatics, database and workflow solutions that accelerate successful life sciences R&D by improving the speed and quality of scientists’ decision making. Researchers around the world depend on Elsevier MDL for innovative and reliable discovery informatics software solutions and services augmented by 400 Elsevier chemistry and life sciences journals and related products. For more information, visit www.mdl.com. Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. For more information visit www.elsevier.com.

Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world-leading publisher and information provider. Reed Elsevier’s ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange). For more information visit www.reedelsevier.com.

MDL and DiscoveryGate are registered trademarks of MDL Information Systems, Inc. (‘Elsevier MDL’) in the United States. All rights reserved. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.

Contact Information

Dr. Phil McHalee

VP, Market and Corporate Communications

Elsevier MDL

Contact via E-mail