The ChEMBL-og

I came across a link to the new Oxford Target Discovery Institute today the website is  http://www.tdi.ox.ac.uk/home  and it contains the BHF Centre for Cardiovascular Target Discovery .  It looks a great new facility, and a significant strengthening of the UK academic armamentarium for drug discovery!

This is a call for people wanting to sign up for the "Structure-Based DrugEBIlity" webinar that will be hosted next Wednesday 4th April at 3.30pm (GMT). It will be a 45 minute webinar where you will be taken through our DrugEBIlity interface. The DrugEBIlity interface is a structure-based druggability search engine where users can survey different types of druggability scores of a given protein structure. 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.

I'm at the ACS in San Diego this week, there are three of the ChEMBLites here - two talks down, one to go. It's been a really great meeting, really excellent. I've even managed to sort of stay on UK time, so waking up at about 2am, and then having a good session on the computer before talks start at 8am. My only moan has been that on the computational side, there are too many interesting parallel sessions, and it's difficult to choose where to go. Anyway, I've spent some time with old and new friends, and feel really upbeat about the way that chemoinformatics is impacting our understanding of biology, and how progress is being made in how to design compounds that modulate biological systems. I sense that the availability of large-scale data and large-scale computing are really feeding off each other and allowing things to be developed that could only be imagined a few years ago. And in a great advance for mankind, internet is free at the conference; seriously ...

The 2012 EMBO Chemical Biology meeting to be held in Heidelberg is looking very good, we had an excellent set of speakers, and now this has been further strengthened with the presence of George Whitesides .  Links to the conference details are  here , registration is now open. We are coordinating some arrangements with the MIPTEC conference in Basel this year, and will set up a daily rate to allow attendees at MIPTEC to participate in the drug discovery sessions at the EMBO meeting. Look in a few days on the conference website for more details of this. Of course, several of the ChEMBL group will be there, and so if you'd like to meet any of us there, hear about our plans for the databases, or know more about research, drop us a line.

The "Cutting Edge Approaches to Drug Design" (CEADD) Symposia, originally set up by the RSC Molecular Modelling Group and now run by the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society (MGMS), are a well-established event i n the scientific calendar. They are aimed primarily at people with a medicinal chemistry background and should also be of interest to those involved in computational biology, computational chemistry, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, biophysics and structural biology. The emphasis is on interdisciplinarity in drug discovery and also on evolving tools and techniques and their application in understanding biological systems. Further details are here . One of the best conferences for modelling in the UK I think!

The Wellcome Trust have announced a £200 million pound fund for startups . This is very good news.

This is a call for people wanting to sign up for the "Schema & SQL Querying" webinar that will be hosted next Wednesday 21st March at 3.30pm (GMT). It will be a 45 minute webinar that will take you through the ChEMBL schema and also how to use SQL queries to extract data from the database. 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 16th of May.