The ChEMBL-og

  As you may know, patents can be inherently noisy documents which can make it challenging to extract drug discovery information from them, such as the key targets or compounds being claimed. There are many reasons for this, ranging from deliberate obfuscation through to the long and detailed nature of the documents. For example, a typical small molecule patent may contain extensive background information relating to the target biology and disease area, chemical synthesis information, biological assay protocols and pharmacological measurements (which may refer to endogenous substances, existing therapies, reaction intermediates, reagents and reference compounds), in addition to description of the claimed compounds themselves.  The SureChEMBL system extracts this chemical information from patent documents through recognition of chemical names, conversion of images and extraction of attached files, and allows patents to be searched for chemical structures of interest. However, t...

Julia is a young programming language that is getting some traction in the scientific community. It is a dynamically typed, memory safe and high performance JIT compiled language that was designed to replace languages such as Matlab, R and Python. We've been keeping an an eye on it for a while but we were missing something... yes, RDKit! Fortunately, Greg very recently added the MinimalLib CFFI interface to the RDKit repertoire. This is nothing else than a C API that makes it very easy to call RDKit from almost any programming language. More information about the MinimalLib is available directly from the source . The existence of this MinimalLib CFFI interface meant that we no longer had an excuse to not give it a go! First, we added a BinaryBuilder recipe for building RDKit's MinimalLib into Julia's Yggdrasil repository (thanks Mosè for reviewing!). The recipe builds and automatically uploads the library to Julia's general package registry. The build currently targe...