The biological sciences have a long tradition of “open data” yet until relatively recently this was not the case in the chemical and chemical biology sciences. The advent of open, public resources such as ChEMBL is now changing that situation. ChEMBL currently contains more than 20m activity values for more than 2m compounds, curated rom the literature, from data depositions and from other relevant sources. Our companion patent resource SureChEMBL contains more than 20 million unique compounds. We are also actively involved in Open Targets, which is a novel public-private partnership involving EMBL-EBI, the Sanger Institute and five Pharmaceutical companies with the goal of improving the quality of target selection for drug discovery. I will illustrate how the EBI’s resources such as ChEMBL, SureChEMBL and Open Targets can be used to tackle a wide range of questions in drug discovery and chemical biology and so help make informed, data-driven decisions on project progression.
Andrew Leach was awarded his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1989 where he was also an undergraduate chemistry student. After a post-doctoral fellowship at UCSF and an early-career academic position at the University of Southampton, he joined GlaxoSmithKline, where for more than 20 years he was involved in the development and application of new platform capabilities for drug discovery in areas including compu- tational chemistry and cheminformatics, fragment-based drug discover drug safety, structural biology and proteomics. In 2016 he joined the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), where as Head of Chemical Biology he has overall responsibility for the institute’s resources in chemo-genomics and small molecule entities including the ChEMBL database. He also runs a small research group and is Head of EBI's Industry Partnerships team.
