Skip to main content

Chembl_02 - Press Release



This morning, there was a press release released, marking the official release of chembl_02. More details are in the press release, but for the blog audience, the data is available in the interface, and the databases available for download on the ftp site. Work is already underway on chembl_03, with some associated minor changes to parts of the schema and additional curation of data. There is also something exciting and special in chembl_03, but more of that later.

There is approximately 20% more data in chembl_02 than chembl_01 and new content highlights include a significant expansion of Natural Product records, and unification of all compound identifiers across all EMBL-EBI records (we use ChEBI ids) all chembldb compounds should now seemlessly and quickly make their way into PubChem.

Many, many thanks to those who have told us of the errors and ambiguities you have found. We will incorporate all of these back into the database for the entire community.
For newer readers a pointer, and for older readers with poor memory, a reminder, of the chembl FAQ, and keep an eye open of the chembl-og (or even better the RSS feed) for schema walkthroughs, support and so forth.

Two pieces of staffing news for the group. Firstly, congratulations to Patricia for her success in getting selected for an EIPOD - this is for a joint collaborative project in peptide SAR between the Koehn and Overington groups. Secondly, we welcome our first PhD student - Felix Krueger, who is immersing himself in programming, databases, British life, and data.

Complementary to the required formality of the press release - some thanks! The entire Chembl team would like to take this opportunity to thank our many friends and colleagues who have helped to date, and will do so in the future. In particular, the Wellcome Trust (especially Alan and Rebecca) for their vision and funding (and Janet, Chris, Henning and Bissan for their essential roles in the grant), the senior management of EMBL, especially Iain and Janet, for their wisdom and continuous support. We'd like to acknowledge the assistance our growing network of external curators (Malcolm, Sam, Lora, and Karen), previous interns (good luck Jigisha!), and outsourcing partners (especially Jignesh and the team). Bissan and Mark at the ICR were essential in the early days of the group, and achieved so much while we were recruiting, and they remain an important part of our work and plans. We also thank and recognise the management and staff of Inpharmatica and their investors, for much of the initial development of the databases was done at that time - you know who you are!. Prof. Hopkins, as ever, you are a star ;) Most essential though has been the friendship, focus and shared purpose of our new colleagues at the EMBL-EBI - especially our new friends in the ChEBI team, as well as the INTACT, Systems, Outreach, PANDA, HSF, EBI Industry programme partners, and many other new friends and colleagues, both at Hinxton and Heidelberg. Finally, finally; we have also been doubly blessed with 1) being able to continue working with several long-term collaborators, and 2) finding new important ones since starting at the EMBL-EBI. The future looks bright, so thank you all!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Improvements in SureChEMBL's chemistry search and adoption of RDKit

    Dear SureChEMBL users, If you frequently rely on our "chemistry search" feature, today brings great news! We’ve recently implemented a major update that makes your search experience faster than ever. What's New? Last week, we upgraded our structure search engine by aligning it with the core code base used in ChEMBL . This update allows SureChEMBL to leverage our FPSim2 Python package , returning results in approximately one second. The similarity search relies on 256-bit RDKit -calculated ECFP4 fingerprints, and a single instance requires approximately 1 GB of RAM to run. SureChEMBL’s FPSim2 file is not currently available for download, but we are considering generating it periodicaly and have created it once for you to try in Google Colab ! For substructure searches, we now also use an RDKit -based solution via SubstructLibrary , which returns results several times faster than our previous implementation. Additionally, structure search results are now sorted by

Improved querying for SureChEMBL

    Dear SureChEMBL users, Earlier this year we ran a survey to identify what you, the users, would like to see next in SureChEMBL. Thank you for offering your feedback! This gave us the opportunity to have some interesting discussions both internally and externally. While we can't publicly reveal precisely our plans for the coming months (everything will be delivered at the right time), we can at least say that improving the compound structure extraction quality is a priority. Unfortunately, the change won't happen overnight as reprocessing 167 millions patents takes a while. However, the good news is that the new generation of optical chemical structure recognition shows good performance, even for patent images! We hope we can share our results with you soon. So in the meantime, what are we doing? You may have noticed a few changes on the SureChEMBL main page. No more "Beta" flag since we consider the system to be stable enough (it does not mean that you will never

ChEMBL brings drug bioactivity data to the Protein Data Bank in Europe

In the quest to develop new drugs, understanding the 3D structure of molecules is crucial. Resources like the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) provide these 3D blueprints for many biological molecules. However, researchers also need to know how these molecules interact with their biological target – their bioactivity. ChEMBL is a treasure trove of bioactivity data for countless drug-like molecules. It tells us how strongly a molecule binds to a target, how it affects a biological process, and even how it might be metabolized. But here's the catch: while ChEMBL provides extensive information on a molecule's activity and cross references to other data sources, it doesn't always tell us if a 3D structure is available for a specific drug-target complex. This can be a roadblock for researchers who need that structural information to design effective drugs. Therefore, connecting ChEMBL data with resources like PDBe and CSD is essen

ChEMBL 34 is out!

We are delighted to announce the release of ChEMBL 34, which includes a full update to drug and clinical candidate drug data. This version of the database, prepared on 28/03/2024 contains:         2,431,025 compounds (of which 2,409,270 have mol files)         3,106,257 compound records (non-unique compounds)         20,772,701 activities         1,644,390 assays         15,598 targets         89,892 documents Data can be downloaded from the ChEMBL FTP site:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/ Please see ChEMBL_34 release notes for full details of all changes in this release:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/chembl_34_release_notes.txt New Data Sources European Medicines Agency (src_id = 66): European Medicines Agency's data correspond to EMA drugs prior to 20 January 2023 (excluding vaccines). 71 out of the 882 newly added EMA drugs are only authorised by EMA, rather than from other regulatory bodies e.g.

In search of the perfect assay description

Credit: Science biotech, CC BY-SA 4.0 Assays des cribe the experimental set-up when testing the activity of drug-like compounds against biological targets; they provide useful context for researchers interested in drug-target relationships. Ver sion 33 of ChEMBL contains 1.6 million diverse assays spanning ADMET, physicochemical, binding, functional and toxicity experiments. A set of well-defined and structured assay descriptions would be valuable for the drug discovery community, particularly for text mining and NLP projects. These would also support ChEMBL's ongoing efforts towards an  in vitro  assay classification. This Blog post will consider the features of the 'perfect' assay description and provide a guide for depositors on the submission of high quality data. ChEMBL's assays are typically structured with the overall aim, target, and method .  The ideal assay description is succinct but contains all the necessary information for easy interpretation by database u