Interactive tool · Preview
Drybench Molecule.
Draw a structure, paste a SMILES or type a drug name. The app computes the standard descriptors, Lipinski's and Veber's rules with the reason for each result, QED with its eight inputs and PAINS alerts, builds one 3D conformer, finds the ten most similar of 2,197 approved drugs and places the molecule on a map of approved drugs, all in your browser with RDKit.js.
Example data: Imatinib. ChEMBL 37, CHEMBL941 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Free during the preview · Runs in your browser · v0.1.0 · chemistry engine about 2.4 MB on first use · Not medical advice
See it before you open it
chemistry engine about 2.4 MB on first use
Features
What you can do with it
Structure editor
Draw with the OpenChemLib editor, paste a SMILES or type a drug name; a name outside the library is looked up on PubChem.
QED, Ro5 and PAINS
Lipinski's rule of 5 and Veber's rules with the reason for each result, QED with its eight inputs, and PAINS alerts with the matching atoms shaded and how many approved drugs match too.
3D conformer
One seeded conformer minimised with MMFF94s+ and drawn in 3D, with notes on what a single conformer cannot tell you.
Similar approved drugs
The ten most similar approved drugs by Morgan fingerprint, with approval year, routes, withdrawal flags and a link to ChEMBL.
Chemical-space map
Where the molecule sits among 2,197 approved drugs on a map of nine properties, coloured by the routes each drug is given by.
Standard descriptors
Molecular weight, exact mass, Crippen logP, TPSA, donors, acceptors, rotatable bonds, rings, Fsp3, heavy atoms and charge, with the formula and canonical SMILES.
Scope stated
Salts, mixtures, metal complexes and undefined stereocentres are flagged, and the rules are withheld for molecules they were never fitted to.
Engine in a worker
RDKit.js runs as WebAssembly in a Web Worker, so the page stays responsive and no structure is sent anywhere to be computed.
How it works
Where it runs and what it sends
- Open, nothing to installThe opening example is precomputed, so the page appears without the chemistry engine. The engine (RDKit.js, about 2.4 MB) loads the first time you type, paste, draw or pick a molecule.
- Compute in your browserRDKit.js computes descriptors, depictions, fingerprints and alerts in a Web Worker; OpenChemLib builds the 3D shape in a second worker and 3Dmol.js draws it.
- Compare with approved drugsA library of 2,197 approved small-molecule drugs from ChEMBL 37 ships with the app, and similarity and the map are computed against it on your machine.
- Only a name goes outA name that is not in the library is looked up on PubChem. No structure is ever sent to a service to be calculated.
What it shows
Give it a molecule by drawing it, pasting a SMILES string or typing a name, and it reports the standard medicinal-chemistry descriptors (molecular weight, Crippen logP, polar surface area, hydrogen-bond donors and acceptors, rotatable bonds, rings, fraction sp3), Lipinski's rule of 5 and Veber's rules with the reason for each pass or fail, the QED drug-likeness score with the eight inputs that set it, and any PAINS substructure alerts.
It then builds a 3D shape, finds the ten most structurally similar approved drugs, and places the molecule on a map of 2,197 approved small-molecule drugs from ChEMBL 37, so you can see whether its property profile looks like that of approved drugs (ChEMBL max_phase 4: approved in at least one country, including some later withdrawn). The map colours each drug by the routes ChEMBL records for it: oral, parenteral (injected or infused) but not oral, topical only, or other or unknown; a drug given both by mouth and by injection counts as oral. Lipinski's rule of 5 is about absorption and permeation and Veber's rules about oral bioavailability, so the colours show where orally given drugs sit among the rest. They are records for approved drugs, not a forecast for your molecule. Links of the form ?smiles= or ?name= open a molecule directly, and the address updates as you work, so any view can be shared. If a link has both, the SMILES decides the structure and the name is only a label.
How it works
All chemistry runs in your browser, apart from the opening example (imatinib), whose results the pipeline works out in advance with the same code, so opening the page does not download the chemistry engine; it loads when you choose, type or draw a molecule, or open a link to one. RDKit.js (the RDKit C++ toolkit compiled to WebAssembly) runs in a Web Worker and computes the descriptors, the 2D drawing and Morgan fingerprints (radius 2, 2,048 bits). RDKit.js has no QED, no PAINS catalogue and no similarity function, so those are ported: QED follows RDKit's QED.py with the same patterns, parameters and weights, PAINS uses the 480 filters from RDKit's FilterCatalog, and Tanimoto similarity is computed on the fingerprint bits. A salt or other multi-part input is described by its largest organic fragment (imatinib mesylate as imatinib), unless another part holds a metal other than a simple counter-ion such as sodium or calcium: PubChem writes carboplatin as its ligands plus a separate platinum ion, so such an input is kept whole and treated as a metal complex. A structure that matches a library drug only after redrawing, such as another tautomer, is recognised by its standard InChIKey.
The ports are checked against Python RDKit of the same release (2026.03.6). On all 2,197 library drugs, the browser gives the same QED to within 3 × 10⁻¹⁶, the same descriptors, formulae and canonical SMILES, the same Morgan bits and the same PAINS matches; 124 of those drugs match at least one PAINS filter, so the positive case is covered too.
The 3D shape comes from OpenChemLib in a second worker: its conformer generator starts from the most likely torsion angles in its built-in torsion tables and avoids clashes, then the MMFF94s+ force field minimises the result. 3Dmol.js draws it. The map is a principal component analysis of nine standardised descriptors. Your molecule is projected with the stored means, standard deviations and loadings, so it lands in the same fixed space as the library, and a drug already in the library lands exactly on its own point.
How it was built
A Node pipeline downloads every approved molecule that ChEMBL types as a small molecule (max_phase 4) from the ChEMBL web services with timeouts and retries, checks that the release is ChEMBL 37, keeps the 2,197 parent molecules that have a structure, describes each with the same RDKit.js code the page uses, fits the PCA and writes one 250 KB JSON file (about 80 KB compressed) with ChEMBL ids, names, SMILES, ChEMBL approval year (its first_approval field), route flags and map coordinates. For the route flags it also downloads every ChEMBL record flagged oral, parenteral or topical, so a flag that ChEMBL sets only on a salt or other form of a drug still counts for the drug. The pipeline also runs the page's own analysis and similarity code on the opening example and saves the result (about 27 KB compressed); a test checks that it matches what the page computes. A Python script with RDKit produces the reference values the tests compare against and converts RDKit's PAINS definitions.
Fingerprints are not shipped. Storing them would add about 110 KB compressed, while computing them from the SMILES takes a second or two in the background worker once RDKit has loaded (the page shows the time it took on your device), and guarantees they match the query fingerprint bit for bit. Names are resolved against the library first and then with PubChem's PUG REST service, using its current SMILES property (requests for the older IsomericSMILES and CanonicalSMILES names now return SMILES and ConnectivitySMILES).
Methods, parameter defaults and references are on the methods page. Read the methods
Keyboard and accessibility
Built for the keyboard and for screen readers
Everywhere in the app
- Show every keyboard shortcut
- ?
- Go to the search field
- /
- Open the command palette
- ControlK
- Open Settings
- Control,
- Close the innermost panel, menu or dialog
- Escape
In this app
- Open the drawing editor
- d
- Go to the 3D shape
- 3
- Go to the map
- m
Single-key shortcuts work outside text fields and can be turned off in Settings.
Commitments
- Controls work from the keyboard, with focus always visible.
- One polite live region announces what changes, for screen readers.
- Reduced motion is honoured, from your system setting or the app's own switch.
- Works at 375 px wide.
Data sources and licences
Where every number comes from
Sources and licences
- ChEMBL 37CC BY-SA 3.0
Approved small-molecule drugs: structures, names, ChEMBL approval years (first_approval), withdrawal flags and route-of-administration flags (oral, parenteral, topical), which colour the map. The derived library file is shared under the same licence.
ChEMBL, release 37 (1 May 2026), EMBL-EBI. Mendez D et al. ChEMBL: towards direct deposition of bioassay data. Nucleic Acids Res 2019;47:D930-D940. Zdrazil B et al. Nucleic Acids Res 2024;52:D1180-D1192. doi:10.6019/CHEMBL.database.37
- PubChem PUG REST (NCBI)No NCBI restrictions; depositor terms may apply
Looks up a structure by name when the name is not in the library. Fetched live at your request; nothing from PubChem is stored or shipped. NCBI places no restrictions on the data, but some depositors may claim rights (see NCBI's disclaimer and copyright notice, linked beside every PubChem result).
PubChem, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NLM/NIH). Kim S et al. PubChem 2025 update. Nucleic Acids Res 2025;53:D1516-D1525.
- RDKit and RDKit.js 2026.03.6BSD-3-Clause
Descriptors, depictions, fingerprints and substructure search in the browser; QED.py and the PAINS filter definitions ported from it.
Copyright (c) 2006-2015, Rational Discovery LLC, Greg Landrum, and Julie Penzotti and others; QED.py copyright (c) 2009-2017, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research Inc.
- InChI (bundled in RDKit.js)MIT
Standard InChIKeys, to recognise a library drug drawn as a different tautomer or salt form.
Copyright (c) 2024 InChI Project.
- OpenChemLib JS 9.25.0BSD-3-Clause
Structure editor, 3D conformer generation and MMFF94s+ minimisation, including its torsion and force-field tables.
Copyright (c) 2015-2017, cheminfo.
- 3Dmol.js 2.5.5BSD-3-Clause
3D display of the conformer.
Copyright (c) 2014, University of Pittsburgh and contributors. Rego N, Koes D. 3Dmol.js: molecular visualization with WebGL. Bioinformatics 2015;31:1322-1324.
- QED: Bickerton et al. 2012Method (cited)
Quantitative estimate of drug-likeness. Nat Chem 2012;4:90-98.
- PAINS: Baell and Holloway 2010Method (cited)
Pan-assay interference substructure filters. J Med Chem 2010;53:2719-2740.
- Rule of 5 and Veber's rulesMethods (cited)
Lipinski et al. Adv Drug Deliv Rev 1997;23:3-25, reprinted 2001;46:3-26. Veber et al. J Med Chem 2002;45:2615-2623.
- Crippen logP, TPSA and Morgan fingerprintsMethods (cited)
Wildman SA, Crippen GM. J Chem Inf Comput Sci 1999;39:868-873 (logP). Ertl P, Rohde B, Selzer P. J Med Chem 2000;43:3714-3717 (topological polar surface area). Rogers D, Hahn M. J Chem Inf Model 2010;50:742-754 (extended-connectivity fingerprints, which Morgan fingerprints implement).
Everything here runs in your browser; the app contacts only these public hosts: pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
Anything in the address bar before the # (a search, a SMILES, an accession or a step) is sent to this site's host when a page loads or a link is opened; anything after the # is not sent.
Not used, by licence:
- DrugBank. Its licence is non-commercial; the drug library is built from ChEMBL instead.
- WHO ATC index. Its terms do not allow copying or distribution for commercial purposes; the map is coloured by ChEMBL's route flags instead.
- Open Babel. Its GPL licence would extend to the app's own code once shipped in the browser.
Limits
What it does not do
- 1. For research and education only. It is not a prediction of whether any molecule will work, be absorbed or be safe, and it is not medical advice.
- 2. Rules of thumb and QED describe typical oral drugs. Many approved drugs break them (natural products, antibiotics, drugs taken up by transporters, injectables), so a fail is a prompt to look closer, not a verdict. They are not given for metal complexes or inorganic salts, which they were never fitted to.
- 3. Crippen logP and TPSA are fast calculated estimates (the Wildman-Crippen and Ertl methods), not measurements; Crippen logP is not the BioByte CLOGP that Lipinski used. The rotatable-bond count uses RDKit's strict definition, which can differ from the software used in the original papers.
- 4. A salt or mixture is described by its largest organic fragment, with its charge as drawn: the tool does not neutralise it. If a smaller fragment holds a metal other than a simple counter-ion such as sodium, potassium, magnesium or calcium, the whole input is kept instead.
- 5. The 3D shape is one conformer from a single seeded run, minimised in vacuum. Real molecules move between many shapes, and a bound drug may look different. Stereocentres not defined in the input (racemic drugs such as ibuprofen and thalidomide, for example) are given an arbitrary configuration in 3D. Molecules with over 100 heavy atoms (in the largest fragment) are not built, large or ring-rich ones (cyclosporin, for example) can take a minute or more, and metal complexes are not modelled.
- 6. The library holds approved parent molecules that ChEMBL types as small molecules and that have a structure. Drugs without a structure (many metal complexes, such as cisplatin, and mixtures) are missing. So are drugs ChEMBL types as proteins, oligosaccharides or unknown, which include peptides and some small molecules such as theophylline, ciclosporin, carfilzomib and acarbose.
- 7. Route groups come from ChEMBL's oral, parenteral and topical flags, which mark routes a drug is known to be given by. They are records, not predictions, and the tool does not say whether any molecule would be orally active. A missing flag means ChEMBL has none, not that the route is never used. ChEMBL counts inhaled and eye products as topical (salmeterol, latanoprost). A flag set only on a salt or other form counts for the drug; this adds one, bortezomib. Of the 2,197 drugs, 1,268 are oral, 371 parenteral but not oral, 221 topical only and 337 other or unknown.
- 8. 75 library drugs are stored by ChEMBL as salts (sodium benzoate, for example) and are compared as stored, so a salt can score below 1.00 against its own parent.
- 9. Approval years are ChEMBL's first_approval field. For many older drugs this is the US approval year, which can be decades after the drug was first used elsewhere: metformin shows 1995, but it was first reported as a diabetes treatment in France in 1957 (Bailey CJ, Diabetologia 2017;60:1566-1576). Some drugs have no year, including many approved only outside the US (gliclazide and domperidone) and a few approved in the US (bortezomib, approved in 2003); some drugs approved only outside the US do have one (agomelatine, 2009). 268 of the 2,197 drugs are flagged by ChEMBL as withdrawn for toxicity in at least one country; they stay in the library and on the map.
- 10. The map keeps 68% of the variance in the nine descriptors (43% on the first axis, 25% on the second), so points close on the map can still differ in ways the map does not show. It compares properties, not structures or targets.
Regulatory position
Use in regulated work
Regulatory position
Drybench Molecule is off-the-shelf software for research and education. It has not been validated for use in a regulated (GxP) environment, and we make no claim of compliance with FDA 21 CFR Part 11, EU Annex 11 or any GxP requirement; no software can be certified as "Part 11 compliant" on its own. Responsibility for compliance, including any validation of the software in your environment, lies with the organisation that uses it. Its price, when set, will not include validation services.
What we provide to help you qualify it yourself: a dated changelog and release notes for every version; a methods page naming each algorithm, parameter default, data source and version; a verification dataset with expected outputs for each release so you can run your own checks; exports and reports that carry the data versions, parameters, limits and a timestamp needed to reproduce a result; and a security overview.
What the app does not do: it does not keep a server-side record of who changed what, it has no electronic signatures, it does not control user access and it provides no IQ/OQ package, because it runs entirely in your browser with no accounts. Saved projects stay in your browser only. If you need those controls, the app can sit inside a validated system that provides them; it cannot provide them itself.
Supplier questionnaires: we answer with a short security and architecture summary (see Trust), and we will say plainly which questions do not apply to browser-only software.
Pricing
Pricing, indicative
Indicative · not yet on saleIndicative pricing, not yet on sale. The tiers on this page are a proposal for how Drybench may be sold. No price has been set, nothing can be bought here, and no licence key exists: during the preview every feature of every app is available to everyone. What each tier would include is shown so the design can be judged; it is not an offer.
Free
Personal, evaluation, classroom and non-commercial use
No charge
no licence key
- Every view, viewer and science feature
- Sample data and share links
- Exports with their sources, licences and limits
- Projects saved in this browser
- The full limits, regulatory position and privacy statement
Academic
Degree-granting institutions and registered charities
to be announced
per seat, billed annually
- Everything in Pro, for non-commercial research and teaching
- Eligibility checked by a person when the licence is issued
Pro
RecommendedOne named user in industry
to be announced
per seat, billed annually
- Commercial use for one named user
- Unlimited saved projects and batch work
- Support by email with a stated response time
- A licence certificate for software-asset records
Team
Groups buying on one order
to be announced
2, 5 or 10 seats
- Pro for each named user, in packs of 2, 5 or 10 seats
- One invoice, with purchase orders accepted above a stated minimum
- Project files that move between colleagues
Tiers and gates follow the norms of comparable tools; prices are set separately and will be published here. Nothing is gated today.
Academic pricing will be a stated fraction of Pro, and a suite bundle will be offered.
An Enterprise tier with central sign-in and governance would need an account layer, which the apps do not have; it is listed so the design is complete.
Trust
Security, changes and methods
Security posture
RDKit.js runs in a Web Worker in your browser. The only host the app contacts besides its own is pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, to look up a name that is not in the library; no structure is sent to it.
- This app contacts only these public hosts:
pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov - No analytics in the apps
- HTTPS only
- Projects and notes are stored only in your browser
- Anything in the address bar before the # (a search, a SMILES, an accession or a step) is sent to this site's host when a page loads or a link is opened; anything after the # is not sent.
- We do not currently hold a formal security certification.
- We do not currently have a formal security questionnaire; we answer supplier questions by email and say plainly which do not apply to browser-only software.
Changelog
Released on the mbio.tech Tools page
The molecule workbench went live: descriptors, Lipinski's and Veber's rules, QED and PAINS from RDKit.js, a 3D conformer, the ten most similar of 2,197 approved drugs from ChEMBL 37 and a map of approved drugs, all computed in the browser.
Docs and methods
Equations, parameter defaults, references, the verification checks and the security overview.
Some data shipped with this app is share-alike (CC BY-SA): files derived from it keep that licence.
Questions
Questions buyers ask
Is my structure sent anywhere?
Not for any calculation: descriptors, alerts, similarity, the map and the 3D shape are all computed in your browser. The only outside service the app contacts is PubChem, and only to look up a name that is not in its library. Anything in the address bar before the # (for example a SMILES in a link) reaches the site's host when the page loads.
What does a rule-of-5 or QED result mean?
Both describe how a molecule compares with typical oral drugs. Many approved drugs break the rules (natural products, antibiotics, drugs taken up by transporters, injectables), so a fail is a prompt to look closer, not a verdict. Nothing here predicts whether a molecule will work, be absorbed or be safe.
Which approved drugs does it compare against?
2,197 approved parent molecules that ChEMBL 37 types as small molecules and that have a structure. Drugs without a structure, and those ChEMBL types as proteins, oligosaccharides or unknown, are not in the library; the limits list examples.
How accurate are the calculated properties?
They come from RDKit's own implementations (Crippen logP, TPSA, Morgan fingerprints) and from ports of RDKit's QED and PAINS, and on all 2,197 library drugs they match Python RDKit of the same release. They are fast calculated estimates, not measurements, and Crippen logP is not the BioByte CLOGP that Lipinski used.
Can I use the results commercially?
The approved-drug library is derived from ChEMBL 37 and shared under CC BY-SA 3.0, so anything you reuse from it, such as library structures or the similar-drug list, keeps ChEMBL's attribution and share-alike terms. The calculation libraries (RDKit.js, OpenChemLib and 3Dmol.js) are BSD-licensed. The app is not on sale yet; the indicative pricing shows how commercial use of the app is expected to be licensed.
Is it validated for regulated (GxP) work?
No. It is off-the-shelf software for research and education and has not been validated for use in a regulated environment. Validating it for your intended use is for your organisation to do; the regulatory position below says what we provide to help.
Next step
Want this tuned to your pipeline?
Email m.beale@me.com with what you need, or use the contact page.
Available from September 2026 for full-time roles and selected freelance projects.