ChEMBL

EMBL run a vibrant postdoctoral fellowship programme called EIPOD. This funds interdisciplinary projects between research groups within EMBL. The 2011 appointment process is just starting, and we are pleased to announce that the ChEMBL group is involved in two projects this year - both based around using informatics techniques to improve Drug Discovery. EIPOD projects have multiple supervisors, with one lab acting as the lead and primary host for the postdoc. Projects are either selected from an approved list, or the candidate can develop their own interdisciplinary project following consultation with the relevant group leaders.

The first project is part of our interest in mining the Internet for clinical development candidate data, delivering an open resource for data-mining and also to lower barriers to data sharing and collaboration. This EIPOD addresses part of this broader project (a sort of ‘Open Source Competitive Intelligence Resource for Drug Discovery’), and specifically looks to identify, define and annotate newly disclosed/published clinical candidates from non-patent and non-literature sources. The project will be led by the text-mining and literature groups here at the EBI under Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann and Johanna McEntyre. Details of the project are here.

The second project is connected with using next generation sequencing (NGS) techniques to profile the organisms present in natural product screening collections and environmentally derived samples. We will attempt to develop a series of heuristics and a combined experimental and informatics pipeline to identify ‘interesting’ samples. Interesting here means those likely to contain chemically novel natural products, with an aim to use these as a source of new leads for drug discovery. This project will be based in the ChEMBL group, and will involve collaboration with the Hunter (EBI) and Bork (Heidelberg) groups. Details of the project are here.

Further details of the application process and deadlines can be found here, and if you are interested in discussing either of the projects (or would be interested in developing your own project idea involving the ChEMBL group), please feel free to mail us.

There are also several other excellent Chemical Biology EIPOD projects available in other labs at EMBL.