In 1997, a workshop involving the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Rutgers University was held to plan the development of a publicly accessible database of measured noncovalent binding data. Initial funding by NIST and the National Science Foundation (NSF) supported the first steps of this effort, and a 2004 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) enabled initiation of BindingDB (bindingdb.org), the first public, web-accessible, database of quantitative protein-ligand affinity data . Currently, funded by the NIH/NIGMS and based at University of California San Diego, BindingDB provides open access to a growing dataset comprising 2.9 million experimental protein-small molecule binding data points, which span 1.3 million compounds and thousands of protein targets.