ChEMBL

One of the advantages (erm?) of my long distance daily five hour odd commute, is the constant company of all the imaginary friends I have on twitter (and of course Roman ;) ). Yesterday, a link to www.quantconnect.com came up in the stream, randomly; so I checked checked for a 3G signal, and browsed to the site. It is a really interesting take on a SAAS/cloud/big data business model. They've built an API, backed it with data and simulation approaches, as a way to develop and select novel trading strategies. There is also the availability of capital to execute these strategies, and for everyone to then make a profit. Smart future 'quants' in their parents spare room, with a laptop and a bunch of ideas and time can become rich, maybe. Traders at the investment banks could make some money on the side, maybe.

Anyway, have a look, it looks really nice, and got me thinking that it would be a great model for a virtual screening/drug repositioning informatics biotech, where the platform 'brokers' a tournament of approaches coded against data held on a data/compute cloud (bioactivity, patents, protein structures, models, etc). Depending on the validation results - customers (large pharma) could then apply these virtual screening strategies against their compound files, and everyone - the coder, the pharma, the patient and the platform developer are happy, maybe.