The ChEMBL-og

Drug development necessitates running in vivo toxicological studies for the assessment of potential untoward side effects. Toxicities may often limit the use of medicines, and sometimes prevent molecules to become drugs. Early selection of chemicals with a low probability of being toxic will improve the whole process, taking less time and resources, including the use of animals. Hence, early in silico prediction of in vivo toxicological results would increase the efficiency of the drug development process and reduce the number of animals to be used in preclinical studies. The eTOX project aims to develop innovative methodological strategies and novel software tools to better predict the toxicological profiles of new molecular entities in early stages of the drug development pipeline. This is planned to be achieved by sharing and jointly exploiting legacy reports of toxicological studies from participating pharmaceutical companies The project will coordinate the efforts of special

We will host a web-meeting demonstration of the chembldb web-interface on Monday 29th March at 3pm GMT. If you are interested in joining, please email us on this link for dial-in details. We will be using the webhuddle software for the demo so it may be worth trying it out on your machine beforehand.

We will host another web-meeting walkthrough of the chembldb core database schema on Tuesday 30th March at 3pm GMT. If you are interested in joining, please email us on this link for dial-in details. We will be using the webhuddle software for the demo so it may be worth trying it out on your machine beforehand.

The world is a really small place, as these pictures of the EBI reveal. Many thanks to the photographer Tim Nugent.

The EMBL-EBI have an active support forum for SME s, if you are interested in joining, see details here The picture above is of a gribble - a really cute sea animal, that nonetheless strikes fear into the heart of seafarers everywhere.

After a fantastic TACBAC 2010 conference in Hinxton, the next conference that I have a small part in organizing is the EMBO conference, Chemical Biology 2010 at EMBL Heidelberg, running from 22nd to 25th September this year. The conference will cover a broad area of approaches and methods used in Chemical Biology including molecular imaging and switching tools, computational and structural approaches, screening methods, molecular engineering, and novel synthetic methods as applied to biological questions. The link to further details is here.