The ChEMBL-og

We have Jean-Louis Reymond visiting us on the morning of Friday the 4th of December, he is going to give a seminar on his group's GDB databases (see previous blog posts, I think this is a very exciting area of science at the moment). If you are interested in coming, please mail me for details and to arrange access to campus. Again xkcd is the source for the cartoon.

Approved on November 5th 2009 was Romidepsin (trade name Istodax). Romidepsin, previously known by the research codes FK-228, FR-901228 and NSC-630176, is a histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor indicated for the treatment of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL) in patients who have received at least one prior systemic therapy. CTCL is a slow-growing cancer of infection-fighting white blood cells called T-lymphocytes . Romidepsin binds directly to the HDAC active site blocking substrate access. HDACs catalyze the removal of acetyl groups from acetylated lysine residues in histones, resulting in the modulation of gene expression. Romidepsin causes the accumulation of acetylated histones, and induces cell cycle arrest and apoptosis of cancer cells. Romidepsin is the fourth drug to be approved for CTCL, after Vorinostat (trade name Zolinza), Bexarotene (trade name Targretin) and Denileukin Difitox (trade name Ontak). Vorinostat is a small-molecule drug which also inhibits HDACs,...

There is no need to sign a license agreement for any of the chembl data or applications. Nor is there the requirement for any payment. The data/software is covered by a creative commons licence - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License . If you have any detailed questions about licensing please get in contact with us.

A brief update of the forthcoming TACBAC 2010 conference. The schedule is now online and it looks very, very good (conflict of interest - I am motivated to say that). But really it does! Have a look for yourself if you don't believe me. TACBAC 2010 schedule The picture above is the top hit for "TACBAC" in google images. TACtical BACon.

Bad news and Good news: You cannot download StARlite. StARlite was a registered trademark for a database developed and marketed by Inpharmatica Ltd.  Some of the databases and intellectual property of Inpharmatica Ltd. were licensed to the EMBL-EBI . What used to be known as StARlite is now part of chembl. chembl downloads accessible from here .

Following unanticipated child illness last week, we will have a web-meeting walkthrough of the chembldb core schema on Friday 27th November at 3pm GMT. The excellent webhuddle will be used, so if you are interested it may be worth checking this out, setting up an account, checking it works on your machine, in advance of the meeting. Mail us if you want links to the phone number and webhuddle link. We are aware that the 27th is over the forthcoming Thanksgiving weekend for our friends located in the United States of America, but we will do a further web-meeting the following week, for those unable to make it on the 27th. Please, please, please use the above link , it is just too complex (for me) to manage emails with all sorts of titles, content and so forth! Also, it causes confusion (for me) if you forward the access details, and then I get messages, phone calls, smoke signals, etc. about the meeting if we need to change things. I have just joined Google wave , and have a few i...

We have received a couple of questions about the 'privacy' of chemical structure searching of our chembldb interface. The root of these questions seems to be 'Is it safe for me to search with a proprietary structure?'. There are probably two components to this - privacy over the route to our servers, and the privacy of the query once it gets on to our site. Basically, we're not interested in what you are searching for, we don't store the queries at all, and have no desire to disclose this sort of data to anyone; however, there are a number of things we could do in the short-term to address some potential corporate/IP concerns. What should be top priority for chembldb interface chemical searching functionality? It's perfect, leave it alone! Add tls encryption (previously generally refered to as https/ssl) Distribute code for the interface and make an install package    pollcode.com free polls We would also welcome contact/discussion to help us develop...