ChEMBL Group Research Retreat 2009

I have provisionally planned the ChEMBL group retreat for 2009. It will be in Crieff, Scotland, and will be in late September. The format will allow detailed discussion and brainstorming of ideas for the ChEMBL project, and will be themed around the following areas.

  • Open-Source Drug Discovery and Open Science.
  • Patent data-mining and indexing.
  • Auto-curation and in-line predictive model generation.
  • An Ontology for drug discovery screening cascades.
  • A web-services primer.

    The mornings and evenings will be informal discussions of science, while the afternoons will be fun, fungi, flora and photography (who said alliteration is dead!) oriented walks in the wooded areas around Crieff. The picture above is of a reasonably rare parasite of truffles (a Cordyceps sp.) found in Crieff around the same time of year in 2008. This is the fruiting stage of the fungus (the teleomorph), the non-fruiting body stage (the anamorph) of a closely related fungus is the source of the powerful immunosuppresive drug cyclosporin, wow!

    I will try and get some really special VIP guests as surprise speakers and participants! ;)