The ChEMBL-og

Drat! It's almost as if the SMR committee look at my Google calendar and book all their meetings on days when I'm otherwise occupied..... Anyway, on Wednesday September 22nd 2010 the SMR are holding a meeting on Epigenetics , one of the hottest current areas of disease biology, at the NHLI , further details here .

ATC code: G03AD02 The most recent approval by FDA is Ulipristal Acetate, approved on August 13th 2010 under the trade name Ella. Ulipristal Acetate (previously known by the research code CDB-2914 or VA-2914) is a progesterone agonist/antagonist emergency contraceptive, indicated for prevention of pregnancy following unprotected intercourse or known or suspected contraceptive failure. This drug is a selective progesterone receptor modulator (SPRM) with antagonist and partial agonist effects (a progesterone agonist/antagonist) at the progesterone receptor (PR, NR3C3) (Uniprot code: P06401 ). The Progesterone Receptor is a member of a very significant family of proteins for drug discovery, the Nuclear Receptors , a family of around 50 genes which are transcription factors , the transcription by NRs is usually ligand regulated. Ulipristal Acetate prevents progesterone, the endogenous ligand, from occupying its receptor. Ulpristal Acetate binds in the ligand binding domain (LBD) of PR

The MGMS have their annual Young Modellers Forum (YMF) meeting on December 10th 2010 at SOAS in London. Further details are here....

A reminder that the deadline for the application for the EMBL-EBI/Sanger ESPOD fellowships is fast approaching - including that for t he exciting Overington/Rayner malaria project - (the final date for applications is August 15th 2010 in fact). So if you are interested, please send in your completed application!

We have penned into our diaries the dates of Monday February 14th 2011 thru Friday  February 18th 2011 for the second ChEMBL residential training course. This will be held on campus here at Hinxton, registration and details of the sessions to be covered will appear on the EBI website shortly. 2010 year was our first course, and we had to prepare a lot of material, etc . but we really enjoyed it, and the 2011 course will be even better. The image above is from the excellent xkcd .

“ Pharmaceutical Knowledge Retrieval through Reasoning of chEMBL RDF ” is the title of my master thesis, a twenty-week research project performed at the Department of Pharmaceutical Bioscience at Uppsala University (Prof. Wikberg, supervised by Egon Willighagen ). The project aims at using the ChEMBL data with a technology that might be new to some: by using semantic web technologies. The life sciences workbench Bioclipse (doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-10-397 ) has support for several semantic web tools, including RDF , and was used to establish such a connection. Two aspects were looked at in this study. Firstly, we developed the search functionality for ChEMBL data to use RDF. For this, we took advantage of the RDF-ized ChEMBL knowledgebase (using the data from ChEMBL 02). Secondly, we developed a use case where compounds derived from ChEMBL are analyzed with the substructure mining software MoSS (see the Bioclipse Wiki ). Here, we search for common and discriminative substructures