Biochemists focused on drug discovery take note: the UK’s Wellcome Trust has announced that an online database of drugs that it bought in 2008 from a private biotech company is now officially launched as a free, open-access concern.

ChEMBLdb (pronounced ˈkembəl) has information on the properties and activities of over 500,000 small molecules. The drug development flavour comes because there’s particular attention on the compounds’ interactions with biological systems. It was transferred for £4.7 million from biotech firm Galapagos NV in July 2008 – since then, the paywall has been taken off and around 100,000 more compounds added by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), which hosts the database.

Details for those interested can be found at the database, and at team leader John Overington’s blog. Happy drug discovering!