July 23, 2008 | BioFocus DPI, the services division of Belgium-based Galapagos, has transferred its drug discovery databases to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) to be freely distributed worldwide. EMBL-EBI acquired the suite of databases and will make them available online with the help of a $9.3 million grant from the Wellcome Trust.

The databases were part of Galapagos' 2006 acquisition of Informatica, Andre Hoekema, senior VP corporate development, told Bio-IT World. The database suite helps identify the best biological targets based on indentifying drug-like chemistry and includes DrugStore (database of known drugs), StARLITe (database of known compounds and their effects), Strudle (binding site drugability), and Kinase SARfari and GPCR SARfari (informatics systems for the most widely used target classes in drug discovery).

"Say you were working on a molecule for lowering cholesterol and you want to find new variant," explains Hoekema, "you can use these databases to see how you can prioritize it and how it compares to what are competing molecules, so it’s very useful to research in this field."

The company previously licensed this information to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. StarDrop, the software platform that helps direct decisions and resources in drug discovery, is not included in the transfer. It will still be offered commercially by BioFocus.

"When we had discussions with the Wellcome Trust they were very eager to make this available to the public domain," says Hoekema. "We thought it was a very good move for us; we’re not in the software business, so [these products were] a bit peripheral for us."

The Wellcome Trust is committed to making important research tools freely available to the research community, Alan Schafer, head of molecular and physiological sciences at Wellcome Trust, said in a press release. Both Galapagos and Wellcome Trust believe that making these drug discovery databases available will speed and enable research.

The databases will be located in the public domain along with other EMBL-EBI open access resources for biomedical research and will be maintained by a newly-established team of scientists at EMBL-EBI.