Medicines for Malaria Venture and EMBL-EBI Establish One-stop Shop for Malaria Drug Data

Press Release | EBI | July 13, 2012

ChEMBL, the online drug-discovery database based at EMBL-EBI, now makes it easy to access all data pertaining to compounds from MMV’s open-access Malaria Box and other open-source malaria research initiatives.

Several new initiatives have catalysed open collaboration in malaria and neglected disease drug research, for example the MMV-supported screening data recently released into the public domain by GSK, Novartis and St Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As a result, the need to integrate and share the resulting data has become more pressing. MMV and ChEMBL have been working together to maximise the strengths of the database and to make the data more discoverable by implementing an easily searchable format. ChEMBL’s data on bioactive compounds can now be searched according to structure, substructure, or a specific library or collection of compounds.

ChEMBL is a large repository of drug-discovery data, containing data on over one million bioactive molecules. It is developed for research into cancer, cardiovascular disease, malaria or indeed any other disease. Data in ChEMBL is made freely available to all researchers, either through a web front-end or by download of the entire database for local use.

You can now search all malaria-related data that was previously housed in the ChEMBL-Neglected Tropical Disease archive as well as data pertaining to the 400 MMV Malaria Box compounds. Future data and discoveries from published MMV projects will continue to be added to the database. To illustrate how this could be useful: a malaria researcher working in Australia could search for data on a particular compound by typing in its name or structure, and access findings unearthed by a researcher in Switzerland working on a completely different question. In this way, ChEMBL will continue to catalyse research, sowing the seeds for collaboration and avoiding expensive duplication of effort.

“By creating a one-stop shop for all the publicly available data that has been amassed through recent open source drug-discovery initiatives such as MMV’s Malaria Box, ChEMBL and MMV have made it simpler for researchers all over the world to access the details of promising malaria and neglected disease molecules and targets at the click of a mouse,” said Tim Wells, MMV’s Chief Scientific Officer. "We hope the ChEMBL database will serve as a useful tool for researchers around the world and look forward to seeing the new projects and ideas it will inspire."

We are delighted to be working with MMV on this," said John Overington, who leads ChEMBL at EMBL-EBI. "The sharing and integration of data are our core interests, and to be doing this to catalyse research in the discovery of novel anti-malarial drugs is a great honour."

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