Course: Practical Aspects of Small Molecule Drug Discovery: At the interface of biology, chemistry and pharmacology

This course aims to give researchers of any discipline a broad introduction to the theoretical, practical and organisational aspects of small molecule drug discovery. Each topic will include a lecture together with discussion sessions or case histories to develop key aspects highlighted in the lectures. In addition there will be practical sessions to illustrate the beginnings of drug discovery programmes, including the production of target product profiles, project plans and milestones, compound progression criteria and scientific strategy. The course is subsidised by the Wellcome Trust and limited bursaries covering up to 50% of the course fee are available (awarded on merit). Course applications and bursary requests must be received by Monday 5 March. Full details are on the website.

Topics will include:
• Project management and organisation of multi-disciplinary projects
• Target discovery and validation
• Hit discovery options
• Screening set selection, storage and quality control
• Screening cascades, assay development and quality control
• Data mining
• Principles of compound optimisation and case histories
• Introduction to pharmacokinetics
• In silico approaches to drug design
• Intellectual property strategy
• Regulatory bodies requirements
• Data packages required for out licensing and partnering
• An introduction to preclinical and clinical development

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Here's a nice Christmas gift - ChEMBL 35 is out!

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ChEMBL 34 is out!

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Improved querying for SureChEMBL

Dear SureChEMBL users, Earlier this year we ran a survey to identify what you, the users, would like to see next in SureChEMBL. Thank you for offering your feedback! This gave us the opportunity to have some interesting discussions both internally and externally. While we can't publicly reveal precisely our plans for the coming months (everything will be delivered at the right time), we can at least say that improving the compound structure extraction quality is a priority. Unfortunately, the change won't happen overnight as reprocessing 167 millions patents takes a while. However, the good news is that the new generation of optical chemical structure recognition shows good performance, even for patent images! We hope we can share our results with you soon. So in the meantime, what are we doing? You may have noticed a few changes on the SureChEMBL main page. No more "Beta" flag since we consider the system to be stable enough (it does not mean that you will never ...

ChEMBL brings drug bioactivity data to the Protein Data Bank in Europe

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