The data was acquired for EMBL in 2008 with an award from The Wellcome Trust,[2] resulting in the creation of the ChEMBL chemogenomics group at EMBL-EBI, led by John Overington.

It is formatted in a manner amenable to computerized data mining, and attempts to standardize activities between different publications, to enable comparative analysis.

GPCR SARfari is a similar workbench focused on GPCRs, and ChEMBL-Neglected Tropical Diseases (ChEMBL-NTD) is a repository for Open Access primary screening and medicinal chemistry data directed at endemic tropical diseases of the developing regions of the Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The primary purpose of ChEMBL-NTD is to provide a freely accessible and permanent archive and distribution centre for deposited data.

myChEMBL, the ChEMBL virtual machine, was released in October 2013 to allow users to access a complete and free, easy-to-install cheminformatics infrastructure.