Two international research collaboration programs focusing on drug discovery and chemical genomics, respectively, were initiated at the Chinese National Compound Library (CNCL) recently. The former is a drug screening study based on a proprietary technology developed by University of Southampton (UK) and the latter concerns drug target identification involving multiple participants such as University of Toronto (Canada), University of Minnesota (USA), RIKEN (Japan) and Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Drs. Rui Liu from University of Southampton and Sheena Li from University of Toronto made special trips to Shanghai to transfer experimental technologies.