The ChEMBL-og

Those of you who went on the course we ran this year will know how much fun it was - and from our perspective we're gonna keep on doing it till we get it right! So, once more, there is another chance to attend the course in 2013 - December 9 to 13th 2013 to be precise. So if you are interested, pencil the dates in your diaries now, and set an automatic alarm for four months before, and check out the full course details then. Of course, there are lots of other excellent courses in the same series, and the poster is available for download to display on your office wall here .

We worry about data security and privacy, a lot. I fret and sweat over this, and it is one of the things (alongside being late with EU reports) that genuinely keeps me awake at night, and that you can never know too much about (again a bit like the EU). We have started to collect examples of security and data privacy issues and vulnerabilities in online chemistry-related resources. Firstly, to build a set of real world examples, and to establish best practice for our own developers. It also allows us to potentially create an environment in which security and privacy matters can be privately discussed without the world being unnecessarily alerted to them; allowing fixes to be made, and generally keep the online chemistry world a better safer place. As would be expected for this sort of thing, the list will not be open, and not indexed in google (if it is right now, we’ve failed at step one!), so if you’re interested in joining the list, and your job involves the buil...

We are thinking of holding an annotatathon for clinical development stage compounds next July, here on campus at the EBI in Hinxton. At this event we will assign/curate efficacy targets for all the clinical stage compounds we have by then identified, simplifying the work by pre-clustering by chemical class/therapeutic area. Data generated during the event will be placed online immediately, and would of course be fully Open (none of this frustrating, online access only for us!). If there is interest in taking part, and contributing to this effort, let me know ! Depending on the level of interest, I may apply for funding to help with travel/accommodation. If you are interested in funding this we'd be delighted to help with this

We're still playing around with data visualisation, and the experiment of this week focuses on the scientific literature and is designed with tablet devices (such as the iPad or the Nexus 7) and smartphones in mind. The application is a re-thinking of PubMed's search interface and you can get to play with it here at  http://pubmed-square.org/ Let us know in the comments what you think.

We have a position in the group in the area of ion-channel structural pharmacology - mapping known ion-channel modulators to sequences and binding sites. This will be in partnership with Pfizer, and the role will involve time spent both at the EBI and at Pfizer's labs in the Cambridge UK area - so a great opportunity to pick up some industrial experience. If you are interested, please get in touch by December 15th 2012 , when we will shortlist candidates for interview.

There are some fantastic initiatives in Open Drug Discovery going on at the moment. I for one, are convinced that we are on the cusp of a large structural change in drug discovery, and like at the beginning of all revolutions, the future is not clear, and we all a little bit excited and nervous at the same time. One of the commonly quoted benefits of an Open strategy is that it can avoid duplication, and if you avoid duplication, it means that you get to the goal, faster and cheaper (since other researchers can explore alternative approaches), and there is no repetition. There, you've just read it, and it's quite seductive isn't it? I've never quite bought this "avoid duplication" argument for the following three reasons. (I should declare my political/philosophical hand here, I have a very deep rooted empathy with the concept of The Free Market. Not the goofy, fudged form that we've had in Western Economies for some time - but that really is a diffe...

Here is a review article on cheminformatics, written as an orientation piece for people from a computational sciences background. %T Cheminformatics %A J.K. Wegner %A A. Sterling %A R. Guha %A A. Bender %A J.-L. Faulon %A J. Hastings %A N. O'Boyle %A J. Overington %A H. Van Vlijmen %A E. Willighagen %J Communications of the ACM %V 55 %I 11 %P 65-75 %O DOI:10.1145/2366316.2366334