About Pathway Solutions

Pathway Solutions is the exclusive worldwide licensing agent for KEGG. We provide licenses to end users, product developers and service providers.

Supported by impressive SGI and Sun supercomputers, KEGG data is curated by a team of full-time staff and distributed to thousands of organizations worldwide.

Brief history of Pathway

Initially, the KEGG project was founded by Prof. Minoru Kanehisa over 10 years ago. The project, funded entirely by Japanese taxpayers, pioneered pathway databases. As the importance of genomic research became clear, KEGG quickly became in demand by most major pharmaceutical companies around the world. Today, even as the KEGG project moves on to the next generation of chemical genomics reserarch, the pathway database remains the most important source for understanding cellular functions.

As the Japanese economy continues to struggle, availability for funding has been in decline. Pathway Solutions was created as a means of ensuring the continuation of the KEGG project through increased funding from commercial sources. By shifting some of the burden away from Japanese taxpayers and asking commercial beneficiaries of KEGG to pay their fair share of the costs, our hope is to create a sustainable model of advanced, non-profit research that will benefit all, regardless of nationality.

Looking ahead

Looking ahead, Pathway intends to place a special emphasis on two aspects of its business.

First, since third party developers help to gain the most value out of KEGG data, we hope to promote our authorized developers as much as possible. As a starting point, you can view our Mosaic page.

Second, we will continue to educate the public about the need to conform with our licensing policies. We believe that KEGG is as asset to all and that commercial entities should not profit from the hard work of KEGG's contributors without paying their fair share of the costs.

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