The ChEMBL-og

Some of the best books on the history of drug discovery have been written by Walter Sneader of University of Strathclyde. Recently I came across a copy The Evolution of Modern Medicine for only $1 in the excellent Strand Books on Broadway, NYC. Of particular interest is the phylogeny of key drug series. Here are the references in the old-school refer format. %D 1985 %A Walter Sneader %B The Evolution of Modern Medicines %I John Wiley & Sons %O ISBN 978-0471904717 %D 1986 %A Walter Sneader %B Drug Development: From Laboratory to Clinic %A John Wiley & Sons %O ISBN 471-91116X %D 1996 %A Walter Sneader %B Drug Prototypes And Their Exploitation %I John Wiley & Sons %O ISBN 978-0471948476 %D 2005 %A Walter Sneader %B Drug Discovery: A History %I WileyBlackwell %O ISBN 978-0471899808

Some job adverts are available on the EMBL website. I will expand this post a little more later with links to each of the individual ChEMBL positions. Group Coordinator Senior Data Integration and Development Officer Scientific Application Developer Chemical Content Curator 2 Web Application Developers Closing dates for application are in the links above.

Here is a pdf of the slides from the joint Biochem. Soc. / RSC meeting on integration of biological and chemical data. Wooo! - the link to the presentation is now there. Thanks for all of those that mailed in.

Here is an outline of the positions we have available within the ChEMBL group at the EMBL-EBI. They are: Wellcome Trust Grant Group co-ordinator Biochemical/Pharmacological content curator Chemical content curator Web developer (ChEMBL) Scientific application developer Senior developer - systems integration EMBL-EBI Funding Web developer (Druggability Portal) These positions should shortly be advertised on the EMBL-EBI web site......

A classic image, showing the relationship of scientific paradigms. Note the distance between chemistry and biology, and just look at the distance between therapeutic research and chemistry. This must change! Click for larger image, and here for more details on the work.

I have been thinking long and hard about the actual process for the public distribution of the ChEMBL data, and nothing is decided yet; however, I think it is likely that there will be a license for the distribution. In line with some of the existing 'free' EMBL-EBI resources, this is likely to take the form of one of the Creative Commons licenses (see http://www.creativecommons.org for more details. So as a question, what experience do people have with these licenses, as applied to public domain databases? Oh, The license we are most like to use is.....   Basically this allows redistribution and the production of derivative works, while applying conditions that attribution must be provided, and that any derivative works will be similarly shared.

As a group, we have been thinking about our identity and branding, and (with pride) display our likely logo for the ChEMBL group. It is meant to strongly echo the existing EBI house logos, while giving a clear chemocentric identity..... Enough waffle, here is the logo.

Chris Steinbeck and I are off to the eScience for Chemoinformatics and Drug Discovery Meeting on the 11th December in Bloomington Indiana. Link to conference website . This should be fun, and I will try and fix up a few meetings around this. Too bad the pound is so weak against the dollar now. However, looking for 'shrooms is free, so I will try and take a days holiday while out there to try and find something interesting.

I have had a couple of recent emails requesting copies of papers, here are some pdfs. %O PMID 17139284 %V 5 %D 2006 %T How many drug targets are there? %P 993-6 %A Overington, John P %A Al-Lazikani, Bissan %A Hopkins, Andrew L %J Nat Rev Drug Discov Nature Reviews Drug Discovery - Drug Target Poster Nature Reviews Drug Discovery - Drug Target Paper %O PMID - 18927591 %V 7 %D 2008 %T Genomic-scale prioritization of drug targets: the TDR Targets database %P 900-7 %A Aguero, Fernan %A Al-Lazikani, Bissan %A Aslett, Martin %A Berriman, Matthew %A Buckner, Frederick S %A Campbell, Robert K %A Carmona, Santiago %A Carruthers, Ian M %A Chan, A W Edith %A Chen, Feng %A Crowther, Gregory J %A Doyle, Maria A %A Hertz-Fowler, Christiane %A Hopkins, Andrew L %A McAllister, Gregg %A Nwaka, Solomon %A Overington, John P %A Pain, Arnab %A Paolini, Gaia V %A Pieper, Ursula %A Ralph, Stuart A %A Riechers, Aaron %A Roos, David S %A Sali, Andrej %A Shanmugam, Dhanasekaran %A Suzuki, Takashi %A ...

I have been invited to present at a joint Biochem Soc/Royal Society of Chemistry meeting in London, on Integration of Drug Discovery and Systems Biology' at Burlington House on the 28th November. I will try and present some new stuff there, if I get the chance to put together some nice slides - hopefully the assay clustering stuff is lying around somewhere. But again it looks an excellent meeting, worth attending for the other talks. Link to conference website

Well, here it is, a placeholder for the ChEMBL blog. There will be more information arriving shortly.