Skip to main content

MMV 11th Call for proposals - H2L and LO for Malaria Drug Discovery


Many of the readers of the ChEMBL-og are interested in drug discovery against neglected and rare diseases. One of the great things for us in this field is the opening up of data in this field - there was the almost simultaneous release of primary HTS data from GSK, Novartis & St. Judes in 2011, more recently the results of a GSK HTS for TB. Having this data publicly available, for all, means that many smart people can analyse the data, and of course, pooling data in this way effectively is equivalent to running the assay against a far larger compound set, and allows more powerful cheminformatics analysis to identify chemical series, preliminary SAR, etc. Many of these datasets are available in our ChEMBL-NTD and ChEMBL-Malaria archives - and we know 2013 will be a great year for more data just like this! All these data are available for download, in the exact form as supplied by the depositor, no accounts/passwords, no lock-in to a software infrastructure, with no restrictions - just as it should be. Free the Data to set the World Free of Disease!

One of our partners, Medicine for Malaria Ventures (MMV) have recently announced an opportunity to get some real funding to take this data forward to real drugs. Further details of the call are here.

The call is for projects in the hit-to-lead (H2L) and lead optimization (LO) stages for new families of molecules specifically addressing the key priorities of the malaria eradication agenda: transmission blocking via the human host, and prevention of P. vivax relapse through killing of liver stage hypnozoites or reactivating them so as to be killed in the blood stages. In addition, proposals are sought for novel chemical series with a long half-life (ideally > 10 hours in rodents) and confirmed in vivo efficacy that could have potential for well tolerated P. falciparum chemoprophylaxis or asexual blood stage treatment in humans. Any proposals based on existing chemotypes must clearly address known issues.

The deadline for applications is 12 noon CET March 15th,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Improvements in SureChEMBL's chemistry search and adoption of RDKit

    Dear SureChEMBL users, If you frequently rely on our "chemistry search" feature, today brings great news! We’ve recently implemented a major update that makes your search experience faster than ever. What's New? Last week, we upgraded our structure search engine by aligning it with the core code base used in ChEMBL . This update allows SureChEMBL to leverage our FPSim2 Python package , returning results in approximately one second. The similarity search relies on 256-bit RDKit -calculated ECFP4 fingerprints, and a single instance requires approximately 1 GB of RAM to run. SureChEMBL’s FPSim2 file is not currently available for download, but we are considering generating it periodicaly and have created it once for you to try in Google Colab ! For substructure searches, we now also use an RDKit -based solution via SubstructLibrary , which returns results several times faster than our previous implementation. Additionally, structure search results are now sorted by

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

In the quest to develop new drugs, understanding the 3D structure of molecules is crucial. Resources like the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) provide these 3D blueprints for many biological molecules. However, researchers also need to know how these molecules interact with their biological target – their bioactivity. ChEMBL is a treasure trove of bioactivity data for countless drug-like molecules. It tells us how strongly a molecule binds to a target, how it affects a biological process, and even how it might be metabolized. But here's the catch: while ChEMBL provides extensive information on a molecule's activity and cross references to other data sources, it doesn't always tell us if a 3D structure is available for a specific drug-target complex. This can be a roadblock for researchers who need that structural information to design effective drugs. Therefore, connecting ChEMBL data with resources like PDBe and CSD is essen

ChEMBL 34 is out!

We are delighted to announce the release of ChEMBL 34, which includes a full update to drug and clinical candidate drug data. This version of the database, prepared on 28/03/2024 contains:         2,431,025 compounds (of which 2,409,270 have mol files)         3,106,257 compound records (non-unique compounds)         20,772,701 activities         1,644,390 assays         15,598 targets         89,892 documents Data can be downloaded from the ChEMBL FTP site:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/ Please see ChEMBL_34 release notes for full details of all changes in this release:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/chembl_34_release_notes.txt New Data Sources European Medicines Agency (src_id = 66): European Medicines Agency's data correspond to EMA drugs prior to 20 January 2023 (excluding vaccines). 71 out of the 882 newly added EMA drugs are only authorised by EMA, rather than from other regulatory bodies e.g.

A python client for accessing ChEMBL web services

Motivation The CheMBL Web Services provide simple reliable programmatic access to the data stored in ChEMBL database. RESTful API approaches are quite easy to master in most languages but still require writing a few lines of code. Additionally, it can be a challenging task to write a nontrivial application using REST without any examples. These factors were the motivation for us to write a small client library for accessing web services from Python. Why Python? We choose this language because Python has become extremely popular (and still growing in use) in scientific applications; there are several Open Source chemical toolkits available in this language, and so the wealth of ChEMBL resources and functionality of those toolkits can be easily combined. Moreover, Python is a very web-friendly language and we wanted to show how easy complex resource acquisition can be expressed in Python. Reinventing the wheel? There are already some libraries providing access to ChEMBL d