Data integration to speed up drug discovery
EMBL-EBI teams up with Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre to integrate structural and biochemical data for drug discovery
Summary
- There are numerous data resources for structural, functional and biochemical data
- A new collaboration brings together data from EMBL-EBI and Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre
- This will enable researchers to access relevant information from disparate datasets, and advance research in target validation, drug development and drug repurposing
16 July, Cambridge – A new collaboration between EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) will see the integration of structural, functional and biochemical data across small molecules and macromolecules. The initiative aims to allow researchers to quickly access relevant information from trusted, but currently separate, datasets, and to advance research in the fields of drug target validation, development and repurposing.
Many databases of quality chemical and biochemical data exist, and for each small molecule there is a huge variety of experimentally determined and calculated properties, which can inform research. The varied nature of these data means that separate databases are used to collect and manage information, each specialising in a particular area.
This initiative, called BioChemGRAPH, will bring together data from the Protein Data Bank in Europe Knowledge Base (PDBe-KB), ChEMBL and the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).
This will provide an accessible resource for basic research, which will facilitate new biological insights, allowing researchers to answer questions like:
- How does this drug target behave?
- Where can this drug be repurposed?
- What potential side-effects could this drug have?
This collaborative project builds on the existing community-driven PDBe-KB platform and will result in novel aggregated views of small molecules, in addition to expanding the UniChem search service. The data integration will take place over the next few months, with the aim of releasing a preliminary version of the knowledge graph in summer 2021.
Read the CCDC press release for more information.
