Role of open chemical data in aiding drug discovery and design

"Researchers in large pharmaceutical companies typically draw on a wide range of data resources and tools to enable decisions regarding target selection, lead identification, optimization and candidate selection. Much of this information is either generated internally or licensed from commercial vendors....By contrast, academic researchers have typically had to rely on a far smaller number of available public-domain resources, together with information scattered across the literature. Access to large chemical and pharmacological datasets has previously been limited, in part due to concerns about the potential loss of intellectual property associated with disclosing compound structures. In recent years, however, there has been a significant increase in the availability of large-scale open data for drug discovery...."