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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Improvements in SureChEMBL's chemistry search and adoption of RDKit

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

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Improved querying for SureChEMBL

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ChEMBL 34 is out!

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In search of the perfect assay description

Credit: Science biotech, CC BY-SA 4.0 Assays des cribe the experimental set-up when testing the activity of drug-like compounds against biological targets; they provide useful context for researchers interested in drug-target relationships. Ver sion 33 of ChEMBL contains 1.6 million diverse assays spanning ADMET, physicochemical, binding, functional and toxicity experiments. A set of well-defined and structured assay descriptions would be valuable for the drug discovery community, particularly for text mining and NLP projects. These would also support ChEMBL's ongoing efforts towards an in vitro assay classification. This Blog post will consider the features of the 'perfect' assay description and provide a guide for depositors on the submission of high quality data. ChEMBL's assays are typically structured with the overall aim, target, and method . The ideal assay description is succinct but contains all the necessary information for easy interpretation by database u

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