Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) reported on May 8 that the American Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) registered the 150 millionth unique chemical substance, a 2-aminopyrimidinecarbonitrile derivative.

CAS said that such a milestone is important, it is not just a number, it is significant for the direction of research. With the rapid growth of global chemical research, it took CAS about 40 years to register 25 million substances in 2005. In the last four years alone, 50 million substances have been registered.

The 150 millionth chemical substance patent belongs to Merck and is one of several promising compounds to be studied as TBK and IKKε inhibitors in the treatment of cancer and immune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and lupus nephritis.

The full name of this substance is 2-[[3,3-difluoro-1-[(2R)-2-hydroxy-1-propoxy]-4-piperidinyl]oxy]-5-[2-[[5-[(2R)-2,4-dimethyl-1-piperazinyl]-6-methoxy-2-pyridinyl]amino]-4-pyrimidinyl]benzonitrile.

The CAS Registry database was created in 1965 to identify and aggregate information on chemical substances. It is today the world's largest database of unique chemical substances that have been manually cited.