ChEMBL is a manually curated database of bioactive molecules with drug-like properties, maintained by the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). It brings together chemical, bioactivity, and genomic data to support drug discovery and development, providing open access to bioactive molecular data for researchers worldwide.
ChEMBL is recognized as both an ELIXIR Core Data Resource and a Global Core Biodata Resource. The current release is ChEMBL_37 (May 2026), containing over 24.5 million activities, approximately 2.9 million distinct compounds, 101,100 publications, and 18,552 targets.
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ChEMBL Data API - REST API providing access to the full ChEMBL database: molecules, targets, bioactivities, assays, approved drugs, drug indications, drug warnings, clinical trial compounds, and more. Base URL:
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/api/data/ -
ChEMBL Cheminformatics Utilities API - Chemical informatics tools (ChEMBL Beaker) providing structure standardization, physico-chemical descriptor calculation, format conversion, substructure matching, and similarity mapping powered by RDKit. Base URL:
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/api/utils/
- Website: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/
- Documentation: https://chembl.gitbook.io/chembl-interface-documentation/
- Interactive API Docs: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/api/data/docs
- Python Client: https://github.com/chembl/chembl_webresource_client
- Terms of Use: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/terms-of-use/
- License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
ChEMBL is freely available to all users with no API key, registration, or subscription required. Both academic and commercial use is permitted under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license with appropriate attribution.