OPRD-Imp: a dataset of experimentally observed impurities and side products in multi-step pharmaceutical syntheses

Abstract

Predicting reaction impurities is a critical yet persistently data-limited challenge in pharmaceutical process chemistry. While machine learning models for reaction outcome prediction have advanced rapidly, benchmarking their ability to predict impurities remains impractical due to the absence of curated, publicly accessible datasets. We present OPRD-Imp, a dataset of 229 organic reactions drawn from 62 publications in Organic Process Research & Development, each annotated with experimentally observed impurities and their mechanistic origins. A total of 784 impurity entries is provided, classified into four origin categories. Reactions are represented as reaction SMILES and impurities as individual SMILES strings, with multi-step synthetic route connectivity preserved. All data were manually extracted from the source publications by trained chemists following a standardized extraction protocol, with expert chemical validation and manual structure drawing. OPRD-Imp is intended to serve as a benchmark resource for evaluating models that predict reaction impurities, providing experimentally reported impurity annotations and mechanistic origin labels that are not systematically represented in conventional reaction datasets.