The ChEMBL-og

What a time! For most of us, this is the first time that we have experienced a pandemic and its impact on our daily life. Although working from home has become our routine in the ChEMBL group, we are still working as hard as ever! Of course, COVID-19 data is taking up some of our attention,  (see  ChEMBL_27 ) but we are also continuing our work relevant to other diseases that affect large populations around the world. Today, we are going to talk about malaria. As you may know, this disease of the  Plasmodium parasite family threatens nearly half of the world’s population and led to over 400,000 deaths in 2019, predominantly among children in resource-limited areas in Africa, Asia and Central and South America. New therapies are desperately needed, in particular to cope with increased resistance against artemisinin-based combination therapies. To help address this challenge, we have been involved in a public-private consortium that aims to deliver a tool to predict pot

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented effort across the global scientific community. Drug discovery groups are contributing in several ways, including the screening of compounds to identify those with potential anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity. When the compounds being assayed are marketed drugs or compounds in clinical development then this may identify potential repurposing opportunities (though there are many other factors to consider including safety and PK/PD considerations; see for example  https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20068379v1.full.pdf+html ). The results from such compound screening can also help inform and drive our understanding of the complex interplay between virus and host at different stages of infection. Several large-scale drug screening studies have now been described and made available as pre-prints or as peer-reviewed publications. The ChEMBL team has been following these developments with significant interest, and as a contr