While studying historical and current chemical exposures can provide insights into their health and environmental impacts, the re-creation of historical exposures to investigate past, present or future health effects using analytical data is severely limited by several factors. These include the past focus on only a few dozen target chemicals (primarily legacy pollutants), in many cases a lack of suitable historical samples for remeasurement with modern analytical methods, as well as the sheer immensity of chemical space under consideration. Patent data, accessible through platforms like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and linked to chemical structures in open databases such as PubChem , offers an alternative data-mining approach for examining past and potential chemical exposures, even though a mention in a patent does not always equate the use of a chemical.