On August 23, Drs. Stephen Bryant and Evan Bolton received the American Chemical Society (ACS) 2016 Herman Skolnik Award for their work in developing, maintaining, and expanding the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s PubChem database of chemical substances and their biological activities. The award was presented at the ACS 252nd National Meeting & Exposition in Philadelphia.
The Herman Skolnik award is named after its first recipient, the founder of the Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, and “recognizes outstanding contributions to and achievements in the theory and practice of chemical information science and related disciplines,” according to ACS.
In its announcement of the award, ACS said: “Under Bryant and Bolton’s leadership, the PubChem team has created a world-class resource for chemical and biological information. PubChem is the first major public database to connect cheminformatics to bioinformatics and thereby provide a unique information resource for pharmaceutical research.”
Introduced in 2004, PubChem currently includes more than 220 million chemical substance records for 90 million unique compounds. The database also contains biological screening results from more than 1.2 million bioassays for over 3.5 million tested substances. The information in PubChem is the result of collaborations with more than 250 academic and commercial organizations that have contributed their data. PubChem is integrated with many other NCBI other databases, with links to related information, such as compounds with similar structures, protein sequences, and relevant journal articles. This extensive network of links provides users with vast opportunities for exploration and for making discoveries. Each day, tens of thousands of researchers from university labs and pharmaceutical and biotech companies access PubChem.