Wellcome Trust funds data transfer from the private sector to the public domain

A large collection of data on properties and activities of drugs and drug-like small molecules, previously privately owned by Galapagos and licensed to biotech and pharmaceutical companies, is to be transferred by EMBL’s European Bioinfomatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) to the public domain through a Wellcome Trust funded initiative worth £4.7M.

The development of new medicines requires a detailed catalogue of how gene molecular parts interact with drugs or drug-like molecules, this science is termed chemogenomics. Researchers at the service division of Galapagos, the BioFocus DPI, have developed a set of chemogenomic databases that help assess drug-gene compatibility and determine drug effectiveness.

Galapagos, a company that bought UCL bioinformatics spin-out Inpharmatica in 2006 and spun-off from a company called Crucell, which itself is a spin-out from Leiden University and Dutch contract research organisation TNO since 1993.

The Wellcome Trust has awarded £4.7 million to EBI to provide free access to all these databases, to which EBI has gained the rights. The data will be incorporated into the EMBL-EBI collection of open-access data resources for biomedical research and will be available to all researchers and contribute to improving the early stages of drug development. Alan Schafer, of the Wellcome Trust, said: “The Wellcome Trust has a strong commitment to making vital research tools freely available to the academic research community. Enabling these previously proprietary data to enter the public domain will allow researchers worldwide to make free use of knowledge essential for drug discovery.”

Onno van de Stolpe, CEO of Galapagos, said: “The scientific community worldwide will greatly benefit from unrestricted access to these data. It will aid their efforts in predictive drug discovery. Galapagos has successfully accelerated its research programmes with these, and BioFocus DPI used the data to deliver on its contracts with customers. After this transfer, which we hope will contribute to the advancement of drug discovery research by improving access to the data that we have collected, we will continue to use these resources.”

Janet Thornton, EMBL-EBI Director, said: “We are excited to be able to provide information that defines the effects of a large number of small molecules on the body, and link this to the proteins that these molecules interact with, as part of our mission to provide wide access to bioinformatics tools to promote scientific progress and disseminate cutting-edge technologies to industry. With this transfer, we aim to facilitate faster and better drug discovery. It speaks to the importance of this information for translational research that the Wellcome Trust has chosen to support this particular transfer with sufficient long-term funding.”