In 2002, the american National Institute of Health (NIH) awarded
a significant grant to Harvard University to
establish a laboratory for chemical genetics (as part of what is now
known as the Initiative for Chemical Genetics). Under the direction
of the chemical biology professor Stuart Schreiber, the laboratory
aims at screening large libraries of small molecules against all
proteins in the genome, with the aim of identifying their
biological properties. They also develop synthetic strategies
for making complex, diverse and natural-product-like small molecules.
ChemBank is a side-product of this initiative. It is a large
(possibly the largest) collection of chemical structures and
biological activity data for small molecules, available freely on
the internet. Their structure database contains currently more than
900,000 compounds.