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CAS patent coverage enhanced to include exemplified prophetic substances

Effective December 12, 2007, CAS began covering exemplified prophetic substances in CA/CAplus, CAS REGISTRY, and CASREACT.

Prophetic substances are defined by CAS as either:

• Specific substances (e.g., reactants, isolated intermediates, products) that are described, but not characterized, in patent examples, and that do not also appear in patent claims.  They may be identified (exemplified) by the inventor by chemical name or structure, including a structure displayed in tabular format.
• Known substances reported in a patent to have novel or new uses when no substantiation of the novel/new uses is provided.

Newly identified prophetic substances are assigned CAS Registry Number identifiers, added to REGISTRY, and indexed in CA/CAplus.  Reactions involving prophetic substances (whether reactants, intermediates, or products) are added to CASREACT.

Initially, prophetic substances will be indexed from English-language basic patents from:

• United States Patent and Trademark Office (US)
• European Patent Office (EP)
• World Intellectual Property Organization (WO)
• United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (GB)
• Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CA)

CAS indexing of prophetic substances in CAplus is considered supplemental to standard patent indexing.  It does not fall under the CAS timeliness guarantee of full indexing within 27 days of receipt of patents from the 9 major patent offices.

The CA/CAplus roles thesaurus has been updated with a new term for prophetic substances, the PRPH super role.  Additional roles may be assigned to prophetic substances.  For more information, enter HELP ROLES and HELP PRPH at an arrow prompt (=>) in CA/CAplus, CASREACT, and REGISTRY.

For questions regarding the impact of prophetic substance indexing on current-awareness alerts (SDIs), contact CAS Customer Care.

For additional information on CA/CAplus, CASREACT, and REGISTRY, refer to the STN Database Summary Sheets.