Who we are & what we do

VEuPathDB shutdown

We would like to bring to the attention of our members that the NIAID contract supporting VEuPathDB will end on 14 September 2024. 

While other bioinformatics resources for the infectious disease community have been funded by NIAID, the VEuPathDB website will go down. 

Please download any information you rely upon, including any critical data; query strategy results, saved/uploaded/shared data associated with your User Profile; Galaxy results, etc ... as soon as possible.

- Please check VEuPathDB website for more information and use the Downloads help page to support your download.

- Alternative funding sources are currently being explored. We will keep you updated and call on your support when needed. Below is a message from VEuPathDB:

"As you know, we have great respect for our users, and appreciate their support and engagement over the past 20+ years.  You may rest assured that we will do anything within our power to ensure that useful data and tools remain accessible.  But even static databases require equipment, people and time to operate, and in the absence of funding, our options are severely limited.

In response to questions about how much it would cost to keep VEuPathDB sites going, the direct cost of maintaining access to existing databases even in static form  is ~$500K/yr mostly covering the cost of equipment and service contracts plus some minimal maintenance… however, without the ability to load new data, improve interfaces, or develop tools accommodating new datatypes, the useful lifetime of such resources is of course limited.  The direct cost of the VEuPathDB project is ~$5M/yr, including the identification, processing, loading, and QC of new datasets, development and deployment of new data analysis pipelines and tools, and outreach activities to ensure effective utlization by our diverse end-user communities.  This is of course a great deal of money, although in my opinion quite cost effective: 2023 statistics show an average of 46K unique users per month from >150 countries, with the typical user returning approximately weekly to access >100 web pages per visit, yielding 11M page hits/mo, 7 Tb downloads/yr, and a cumulative total of >35K literature citations to date."