A Dating Site For Chemists and Biologists

Probably everyone who reads the ChEMBL-og will have world-changing ideas - but it's really difficult to find someone to screen a few compounds for you - of course there are CROs who will want to meet, then prepare a quote for you, set up a CDA, receive payment, etc., but cash is difficult to get hold of, and the process will be slow. There are no grant mechanisms for this sort of thing either - imagine - "I'd like funds to test four compounds as potential inhibitors of snoraze" - no chance (at least with the panels I've sat on) too small, too speculative.... The bigger problem though is finding someone with the assay or the compounds.

But, there's a lot of people with compounds to test, and a lot of biologists with assays that are easy to run in their labs, and they have expertise in, but who can't assemble sets of interesting compounds to profile. Why not just use the paradigm of a dating site to matchmake mutually compatible biologists and chemists - if there is a spark, it could develop into a long lasting (collaborative) relationship!

Imagine something like:

Biologist with HMGCoA reductase assay and expertise in cholesterol homeostasis would like to meet chemist with non-statin compounds likely to be brain penetrant to test a cool idea.

Anyway, there's a toy FaceBook group that I've set up - just to get the idea across. I've pitched this as a national thing (so for me that means to the UK, for you somewhere different maybe) - not least that it's a lot easier to ship compounds around within a country than between - and also there's a clear match to downstream funding opportunities. I chose FaceBook, since most of the open LinkedIn groups I'm involved in are train-wrecks of spam and flame-wars.

I think this idea is worth trying, or at least getting some discussion started over - huge thanks to Tom Heightman for our recent discussion on things that needed to be done in Chemical Biology in the UK.

Maybe Google+ is another alternative.

Comments

Bio to Chem said…

1) Couldn't agree more re LinkedIN. My 2-cent whinge from last year (below) got zero responses "@cdsouthan exasperated that many of his LinkedIN groups show no moderation. Hence valuable discussions are contaminated with spurious comments or plugs
12:15 PM - 19 Nov 11 via LinkedIn"

2) Have asked to join dating agency. I have nothing to broker lab-wise but I might be able to help someone "find" something e.g. by patent ferreting.

3 March 2012 at 19:27

Unknown said…

Great idea, John.

5 March 2012 at 20:49

Luís Figueiredo said…

The French have something similar to that they call it La Chimiothèque Nationale (see the article Hilbert 2009). But from what I understood it isn't very open, in the sense that you don't know who is sending you the compounds and even what compounds are in each well. I hope I am wrong but to create an open library or a dating agency is a difficult job as there are many interests from both sides of the wall.

12 March 2012 at 09:18

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.

New SureChEMBL announcement

(Generated with DALL-E 3 ∙ 30 October 2023 at 1:48 pm) We have some very exciting news to report: the new SureChEMBL is now available! Hooray! What is SureChEMBL, you may ask. Good question! In our portfolio of chemical biology services, alongside our established database of bioactivity data for drug-like molecules ChEMBL , our dictionary of annotated small molecule entities ChEBI , and our compound cross-referencing system UniChem , we also deliver a database of annotated patents! Almost 10 years ago , EMBL-EBI acquired the SureChem system of chemically annotated patents and made this freely accessible in the public domain as SureChEMBL. Since then, our team has continued to maintain and deliver SureChEMBL. However, this has become increasingly challenging due to the complexities of the underlying codebase. We were awarded a Wellcome Trust grant in 2021 to completely overhaul SureChEMBL, with a new UI, backend infrastructure, and new f

Accessing SureChEMBL data in bulk

It is the peak of the summer (at least in this hemisphere) and many of our readers/users will be on holiday, perhaps on an island enjoying the sea. Luckily, for the rest of us there is still the 'sea' of SureChEMBL data that awaits to be enjoyed and explored for hidden 'treasures' (let me know if I pushed this analogy too far). See here and here for a reminder of SureChEMBL is and what it does. This wealth of (big) data can be accessed via the SureChEMBL interface , where users can submit quite sophisticated and granular queries by combining: i) Lucene fields against full-text and bibliographic metadata and ii) advanced structure query features against the annotated compound corpus. Examples of such queries will be the topic of a future post. Once the search results are back, users can browse through and export the chemistry from the patent(s) of interest. In addition to this functionality, we've been receiving user requests for local (behind the

New Drug Approvals - Pt. XVII - Telavancin (Vibativ)

The latest new drug approval, on 11th September 2009 was Telavancin - which was approved for the treatment of adults with complicated skin and skin structure infections (cSSSI) caused by susceptible Gram-positive bacteria , including Staphylococcus aureus , both methicillin-resistant (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible (MSSA) strains. Telavancin is also active against Streptococcus pyogenes , Streptococcus agalactiae , Streptococcus anginosus group (includes S. anginosus, S. intermedius and S. constellatus ) and Enterococcus faecalis (vancomycin susceptible isolates only). Telavancin is a semisynthetic derivative of Vancomycin. Vancomycin itself is a natural product drug, isolated originally from soil samples in Borneo, and is produced by controlled fermentation of Amycolatopsis orientalis - a member of the Actinobacteria . Telavancin has a dual mechanism of action, firstly it inhibits bacterial cell wall synthesis by interfering with the polymerization and cross-linking of peptid

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

The ChEMBL-og

Search This Blog