CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society specializing in scientific information solutions, has announced the launch of a major expansion of the CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform into life sciences.

The enhanced platform includes over 2 million modified biosequences, 60 years of patent literature, and one of the largest collections of journal information including PubMed’s biomedical and life science data.

The CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform expansion unlocks human-indexed insights from journals and patents in over 50 languages dating back to 1957 and 70 million biosequences curated by CAS scientists. The collection also includes unique biosequences not found elsewhere in electronic resources. 

The launch is the culmination of an 18-month effort to curate over 600 million additional proteins and nucleotides and integrate BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), CDR (Complementarity-Determining Regions) for antibody and T-cell receptors, and motif search capabilities into the platform.

As R&D increasingly relies on quality data to expedite discovery, a key challenge facing biomedical researchers is harnessing vast amounts of sequence data spread across thousands of sources,” says CAS President Manuel Guzman. “This significant expansion of the CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform underscores our commitment to life sciences by providing molecular biology researchers the high-quality information that chemists have relied on CAS for over the last 110 years.”