The ChEMBL-og

ATC code : B02BD07 On February 17 th 2011, the FDA approved human coagulation Factor XIII (FXIII) Concentrate as an orphan drug under the trade name Corifact (ATC code B02BD07 ) to treat congenital Factor XIII deficiency  (OMIM: 134570  and OMIM: 134580 , ICD-10:D68.2). The incidence of this rare condition is 1 in 1 to 5 million, making it the rarest form of hemophilia . The genetic deficiency leads to defective fibrin crosslinking, the terminal step of the coagulation cascade which leads to blood forming clots to deplete its loss from damaged vessels. Prior to US approval, FXIII Concentrate had already been marketed in Europe, as Fibrogammin P ,  developed by CSL Behring of Marburg, Germany. Recently, recombinant FXIII (rFXIII, Novo Nordisk, Bagsværd, Denmark) has completed phase 3 clinical trials. FXIII exists naturally as a secreted, tetrameric protein (with composition A2B2) with a molecular weight of ca. 320 kDa. The tetramer consists of twice two catalytically

Thanks to Yumi for the translation of our ChEMBL home page into Chinese. At the moment, this is on the dev site http://wwwdev.ebi.ac.uk/chembl , but it will soon migrate to the normal location.

The flat files (sdf, chemical representatives, fasta and release notes) and the mysql dump from the latest ChEMBL release are now available as torrents on the BioTorrents website, click here for more details. We have been a bit slack in maintaining the ChEMBL BioTorrent downloads, but will always aim to make the these torrent files available for future ChEMBL releases.

The guys at the NCI Cactus blog have done a great job of rendering the new ChEMBL schema as released in ChEMBL_09 . There are quite a few changes, and we have started to load/curate new data against this schema - so check with us if your analyses rely on something currently in there! Click on the above image for a large view. Things will be fairly quiet at ChEMBL Manor next week - we have the annual ChEMBL training course which will keep us busy, and hopefully out of any trouble.

Registration is now open for the next EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute Open Day, which will take place on Tuesday 15th March 2011. The 'Open Day' is the perfect opportunity for young scientists who are considering a career in bioinformatics (and related disciplines) to find out more about opportunities at Europe's main centre for bioinformatics. You will learn about cutting-edge research projects, get an overview of one of the world's most important collections of biological databases and tools, and be given time to talk one-to-one with the experts who develop and curate these services. There is also the chance to hear a talk from one of the ChEMBL team, talking about a curator job. Registration is FREE, but places are limited to 40 so please register now to avoid disappointment. Please go to http://www.ebi.ac.uk/training/openday/  for a full programme and registration details.

We are pleased to announce the release of ChEMBL_09 and a new version of the ChEMBL web interface. This release of the ChEMBL database contains initial entries for small molecule and biotherapeutic drugs, together with product information from the FDA Orange Book. This data will be subject to further updates and curation in subsequent releases and therefore some property assignments should be considered preliminary. It should also be noted that a number of the approved products do not have therapeutic uses ( e.g. , diagnostic agents, additives etc .). These non-therapeutics are currently included in the database, but are flagged as such. We have also now incorporated the chemical structures of ligands from entries in PDBe (Protein Data Bank in Europe) into to ChEMBL. Use of ChEBI IDs : ChEMBL will continue to assign ChEBI identifiers to small molecules with known structures, and these compounds will be indexed by ChEBI for search purposes. However, only a subset of highly cu

There are a lot of excellent chemical sketchers available, and we have now implemented a choice of three within the ChEMBL interface - JME Molecular Editor , Jdraw and MarvinSketch . These three were the three most requested chemical drawing packages, but if there is demand for more please feel free to suggest additional ones. Please consider this multi-sketcher capability as still in a test phase, and please report any problems you find.

ChEMBL is now available in a Japanese language form (to access this, just click on the appropriate flag at the top right of the ChEMBL home page ).

I have been invited to speak at the Biochemical Society  and Chinese Protein Society   Joint Sino-UK Protein Symposium being held on the 5th to 7th of May at Shanghai University , China. Some excellent speakers on the agenda, including David Stuart, David Barford, Guy Dodson, and Zhang Youshang. Immunizations and visa office here I come!