Compound bioactivities go public

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/ There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, where pharmaceutical companies often had the edge over academic research in the drug discovery field, in part for a simple but powerful reason: vast repositories of compound bioactivity data. In any given year, a typical large pharmaceutical company would have the capacity to run hundreds of high-throughput screens of on the order of about a million compounds, creating primary actives in the order of millions and dose-response curves that number in the tens of thousands. In contrast to data obtained in the bioinformatics world—where genomic sequences were publicly deposited in GenBank, protein sequences found their home in SwissProt and protein crystal structures could be accessed by everyone through the Protein Data Bank—there were scarce opportunities for academic researchers to access and mine large amounts of bioactivity data. This factor (among others) led to a disconnect between industrial and academic drug discovery efforts.