The ChEMBL-og

This is a last chance call for people who want to sign up for the "Web Services" webinar that will be hosted this Wednesday 2nd May at 3.30pm (GMT+1). It will be a 45 minute webinar that will take you through the ChEMBL web services. Remember to register your interest in our webinars on the Doodle Poll . Make sure that you leave your email address  as well as your name so that we can send the connection details to you. Any problems, please contact chembl-help@ebi.ac.uk. The poll will be closed tomorrow, 1st May to allow us to send out the connection details to the attendees.

Today, I (Louisa) gave a workshop talk at the Bio-IT World Expo in Boston. The title of the talk was 'Curating and Mapping the Drug Name Space in ChEMBL'. This expo is being held at the Boston World Trade Center, which is a great location right on the waterfront. It is the 10th anniversary of the expo, so I am expecting the rest of the conference to be very interesting and I have already tagged some talks that I definitely want to go to.

Yesterday, I gave a tutorial in Toronto, Canada on how to use the EBI chemical entities databases as part of the 'Patent Informatics: Sequence & Chemical Databases for Prior Art Searching' workshop. This one day session was organised by the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshop . It was held at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, which is situated in downtown Toronto. It was a very well organised workshop with good facilities and tasty refreshments. Toronto is a beautiful city and I hope to explore it tomorrow before flying down to Boston to give my talk at Bio-IT World.

ATC code : V09AX05 ( incomplete ) On April 6th, FDA approved Amyvid (Florbetapir F 18), a radio labeled intravenous imaging agent for the differential diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease. Alzheimer's Disease (OMIM 104300 , MeSH D000544 ) is a non-treatable, progressively worsening and fatal disease and the main cause of dementia . Most commonly affecting the elderly (>65y), it correlates with the growing deposits of aggregating beta amyloid (UniProt P05067 ) fibrils in the brain, eventually physically destroying it, and abnormal aggregation of the tau protein (UniProt P10636 ), a microtubule-associated protein inside neurons. Early symptoms of Alzheimer's include impairment of short term memory, advanced ones, irritability, confusion, aggression, mood swings, and long term memory loss, amongst others. Diagnosis of Alzheimer's is complicated by overlap of symptoms with other cognitive diseases, and "normal" signs of ageing; sometimes, only brai...

On Friday 11th May 2012 we are running a small (and free ) interactive workshop on "Shaping the Future of ChEMBL".  We would like your input to develop some easy to use workflows for several key tasks that drug discoverers often want to do, and could do more efficiently with the ChEMBL data.  These workflows would be aimed at medicinal chemists and would cover the use of ChEMBL data in lead generation and optimization tasks, hence we would like to involve medicinal chemists in their creation and implementation.   The workshop will be on campus here at Hinxton, and will start around 10am and finish around 3pm (lunch, coffee and cakes will be provided). If you are interested in helping, with what will hopefully be a fun day , please contact us.

This is a call for people wanting to sign up for the "Interface & Searching" webinar that will be hosted next Wednesday 18th April at 3.30pm (GMT). It will be a 45 minute webinar that will take you through the ChEMBL interface and schema, showing you how to navigate the data and how the tables are all connected. Remember to register your interest in our webinars on the Doodle Poll . Make sure that you leave your **email address** as well as your name so that we can send the connection details to you. Any problems, please contact chembl-help@ebi.ac.uk. For those of you who can't make it to this webinar, we will be hosting it again on the 13th June.

This joint EBI-Wellcome Trust course aims to provide the participants with the principles of chemical biology and how to use computational methods to probe, explore and modulate biological systems using chemical tools. The course will be comprised of a mixture of lectures and hands-on components. The conceptual framework will be covered, as well as direct practical experience of retrieving and analysing chemogenomics data. Participants will be able to do their own target analysis and identify appropriate chemical tools for probing biological systems of interest to them. Check out more details on the link above.

Well, there's a great paper in a recent Nature Reviews Drug Discovery from a cross-industry set of authors on a retrospective analysis of HTS in drug discovery - lots of data, lots of examples, and a balanced argument for the case for high-throughput screening in modern pharmaceutical discovery. %T Impact of high-throughput screening in biomedical research %J Nature Rev. Drug Disc. %V 10 %D 2012 %P 188-195 %A R. Macarron %A M.N. Banks %A D. Bojanic %A D.J. Burns %A D.A. Cirovic %A T. Garyantes %A D.V.S. Green %A R.P. Hertzberg %A W.P. Janzen %A J.W. Paslay %A U. Schopfer %A G.S. Sittampalam

ATC code : B03XA (incomplete) On March 27, the FDA approved Peginesatide for the treatment of anemia due to chronic kindney disease (CDK) in patients on dialysis. CDK is a slow but progressive loss of kidney function that can be caused by diabetes mellitus ,  hypertension and glomerulonephritis , among others. One of the symptoms in the advanced stages of CDK is anemia, a decrease in the number of red blood cells and hence the hemoglobin (adult hemoglobin: heterotetramer of two copies of  P69905 and two copies of  P68871 ) content of the blood. Anemia in patients suffering from CDK is caused by reduced production of erythropoetin , a hormone that regulates the levels of red blood cells and is synthesized predominantly in the cortex of the kidney. Anemia induced by CDK can be treated by supplying exogenous erythroepotin or analogs of this hormone ( e.g . Methoxy polyethylene glycol-epoetin beta, CHEMBL1201829 ). The collective term for these substances is eryt...