ChEMBL Connector

Anthropic-packaged plugin and Claude.ai connector over ChEMBL, EMBL-EBI’s manually curated database of bioactive compounds, biological targets, and quantitative activity measurements drawn from medicinal-chemistry literature.

   
Type Claude Code Plugin (wraps a remote MCP server) · Claude.ai Connector
Supplier EMBL-EBI ChEMBL (data); plugin packaged by Anthropic
Availability GA in the anthropics/life-sciences marketplace; announced at J.P. Morgan 2026 (January 2026)
Pricing Free / OSS (ChEMBL data CC-BY-SA-3.0)
Capabilities Read-only

How to install

  • Also packaged in the SciAgent-Skills collection (jaechang-hits (community OSS, CC BY 4.0)): clone jaechang-hits/SciAgent-Skills and run /plugin install sciagent-skills in Claude Code (or copy skills/structural-biology-drug-discovery/chembl-database-bioactivity into ~/.claude/skills/).
  • Claude Code — plugin marketplace: 
    /plugin marketplace add anthropics/life-sciences
/plugin install chembl@life-sciences

    Restart Claude Code, then /mcp to confirm the server is connected. If skills don’t appear, /reload-plugins.

  • Claude.ai (Team / Enterprise) — Admin settings → Connectors → Browse connectors → ChEMBL → Add to your team.
  • Claude.ai (individual) — Settings → Connectors → ChEMBL → Connect.

What it does

Six tool calls over the ChEMBL REST API:

  • compound_search — find molecules by name, ChEMBL ID, or SMILES; returns molecular properties, synonyms, approval status, ATC codes
  • target_search — query biological targets by name, gene symbol, or organism; returns protein accessions, GO annotations, UniProt cross-refs
  • get_bioactivity — quantitative activity measurements (IC50, EC50, Ki, Kd) with assay descriptions, pChEMBL scores, and literature references
  • get_mechanism — curated mechanism-of-action data for approved drugs
  • Plus two further tools for cross-referencing and metadata lookup

Primary use cases: Medicinal-chemistry SAR analysis, target validation, polypharmacology and off-target screening, lead-compound optimisation against ChEMBL bioactivity data.

Notes

Streamable HTTP transport — Claude Code uses the marketplace plugin entry directly; Claude.ai uses the managed connector. Replaces ad-hoc Augmented-Nature / iwatobipen community wrappers for users with marketplace access. ChEMBL data is updated quarterly by EMBL-EBI.

Field report (2026-05-29): install via /plugin marketplace add anthropics/life-sciences then /plugin install chembl@life-sciences reported working without modification (feedback #17).

Sources

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