Transfer of pharmaceutical data resources, private to public domain has greatest impact

While this is very encouraging what's going to be it's impact on the industry on proprietary database vendors? More & more of open database consortia and open curation models are on the offing, with high level of participation from both the academia and the Industry.

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute has launched a "vast online database" of genomic-based drug and small molecule information available in an open access format for researchers seeking new therapeutics, according to EMBL-EBI.

The ChEMBLdb holds translational information on more than 520,000 small molecules, including data on target binding, the affect these compounds have on cells and organisms, and information about the molecules' absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity.

"The data lie at the heart of translating information from the human genome into successful new drugs in the clinic," EMBL-EBI said this week.

EMBL-EBI is hosting the database, which was transferred from the biotech company Galapagos through a £4.7 million ($7.7 million) Strategic Award from the Wellcome Trust.

"This unprecedented transfer of pharmaceutical data resources from the private sector to the public domain should have the greatest impact on researchers in academia and in small companies on limited budgets," Alan Schafer, director of science funding at the Wellcome Trust, said in a statement.

"ChEMBLdb will be a major resource of information for driving forward medicinal chemistry and drug development in the UK and internationally," Schafer said.

EMBL-EBI also said that, along with partner Wellcome Trust, it has released an integrated resource of sequence, compound, and screening data from a range of sources for protein kinases, called Kinase SARfari.