ChEMBL
ChEMBL is a database of bioactive molecules, drugs and their targets, maintained by EMBL-EBI. Through ScholarMuse, an agent can look up one drug or compound by generic name, brand name, research code or ChEMBL id, and get its clinical phase, basic chemistry, curated mechanisms of action and the genes and UniProt accessions of its targets. It is a research lookup, not medical advice.
ScholarMuse tools: lookup_drug. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from ChEMBL.
lookup_drug
The record of type "drug" comes from ChEMBL. mechanisms, targetGenes and potencyMeasurements are filled only when the targets section is requested (it is by default).
- chemblId
- ChEMBL molecule id
- maxPhase
- Highest clinical phase reached
- moleculeType
- Molecule type, e.g. small molecule
- firstApproval
- Year of first approval
- formula
- Molecular formula
- molecularWeight
- Molecular weight
- smiles
- Canonical SMILES, up to 500 characters
- atcCodes
- ATC classification codes, up to 6
- tradeNames
- Trade names, up to 8
- mechanisms
- Mechanism, action, target, genes and UniProt ids
- targetGenes
- Gene symbols across all mechanisms, up to 30
- potencyMeasurements
- Count of activities with a pChEMBL value
What it covers
- ChEMBL molecules, matched by ChEMBL id, exact preferred name, exact synonym (brand names, research codes), then ChEMBL full-text search.
- Curated mechanisms of action for the parent molecule, with target name, type, organism, gene symbols and UniProt accessions.
- Drug-level facts: routes (oral, parenteral, topical), ATC codes, trade names, ChEMBL black box warning flag and withdrawn flag.
Limits
- One molecule per call. When several match, the one with the highest clinical phase is returned, so this is a lookup and not a list search.
- Individual bioactivity values (IC50, Ki and so on) are not returned, only a count of measurements that have a pChEMBL value.
- At most 25 mechanisms per drug. No search by target, structure or similarity.
- ChEMBL requests are given up to 25 seconds each, and a full lookup makes several of them.
How ScholarMuse reaches ChEMBL
The connector calls the ChEMBL data API at ebi.ac.uk/chembl/api/data, using the molecule, mechanism, target and activity resources. No API key is sent.
Responses are cached for up to 7 days, so changes from a new ChEMBL release can take that long to appear.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0
Drug and bioactivity data from ChEMBL (ebi.ac.uk/chembl), EMBL-EBI, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Records that come from ChEMBL carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow ChEMBL's own citation guidance.
