• Recruitment - Two positions in ChEMBL team now available



    We have two posts available in the ChEMBL group - one a web developer, and the other a data integration post. The positions are both for three years and will be EMBL staff contracts. Closing dates for applications is the 27th November 2011.

    Further details should be available here (the links are quite fragile I'm afraid, so sorry if they do not keep working for long)




    If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

  • PhD studentship at the Institute of Cancer Research


    From the lab of one of our collaborators comes the following......

    Details of forthcoming PhD studentships at The Institute of Cancer Research ICR are now on-line; There are 12 studentships across a range of different disciplines including Biology, Chemistry, Informatics and Medical Physics. The deadline for applications is 1st December 2011.

    There is a specific studentship of likely interest to ChEMBL-og readers - Identifying novel targets and target combinations for cancer using in-silico chemical biology, within the Computational Biology and Chemogenomics Team of the ICR.


    This is a computational biology/lab biology PhD jointly between Dr. Bissan Al-Lazikani and Prof. Paul Workman. The project is an exciting multi-disciplnary project that will utilise bioinformatics and chemogenomics techniques, protein interaction network modelling as well as laboratory biology to identify novel drug intervention targets (and compounds) for use in combination therapies with best-in-class HSP90 inhibitors. The first two years of the project will be primarily computational (with an opportunity to do some basic Mass. Spec. proteomics work in the laboratory) and focus on multi-omics data mining, network modelling chemogenomic and druggability analysis. Discoveries made though the first two years will then be validated in the laboratory utilising RNA interference, cellular drug screening and other molecular and cellular biology techniques. The project benefits for a collaboration with Dr. Paul Huang and Dr. Julio Saez-Rodriguez (of the EMBL-EBI) who bring network proteomics and network modelling expertise.


    Full details of the project can be found here.


    The PhD is a four year project funded through the MRC studentship program. Please check eligibility criteria before applying.

  • Want to help shape the future of ChEMBL?


    We are planning to hold two half-day (fun) workshops in mid February next year (i.e. the week of February 13th 2012). Aimed at medicinal chemists and molecular modellers - the idea is to develop easy to use workflows for several key tasks that drug discoverers often want to do, and could do more efficiently with the ChEMBL data.

    The workshops will be on campus here at Hinxton, and will start around 10.30am and finish around 3pm (lunch, coffee and cakes will be provided); the focus will be on....


    • Day 1 - Use of ChEMBL in lead optimisation
    • Day 2 - Use of ChEMBL for library design/compound purchase


    If you are interested in helping, please mail us, and tell us what session you'd most like to attend. Space will be limited to around 8 attendees.

  • http://timetree.org/


    You know those arguments you sometimes get into with friends, the ones that are like "no way did lagomorphs diverge from rodents only 50 million years ago!" well there's a cool iPhone app (also available on Android) to help settle those debates, or simply satisfy idle curiosity on the timeline of evolution.

    Link to the iTunes store is here. The original website for the data is http://timetree.org/

  • Why Movember is Important


    'Excluding skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among men in the US and the second most common cause of cancer death among men. It is estimated that about 1 in 6 men in the US will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime and 1 in 36 will die from this disease.'


    Quote from Cancer Facts & Figures 2010. American Cancer Society

  • Paper: canSAR


    One of our collaborators has just published a paper in NAR Database issue on an integrative system for Anticancer Drug Discovery - canSAR. 

    %J Nucleic Acids Research
%D 2011
%O doi:10.1093/nar/gkr881
%T canSAR: an integrated cancer public translational research and drug discovery resource
%A M.D. Halling-Brown
%A K.C. Bulusu
%A M. Patel 
%A J.E. Tym
%A B. Al-Lazikani
    The website for canSAR is https://cansar.icr.ac.uk/

  • Some Downtime is Coming Up....

    Our Hinxton Data centre is being shutdown this coming weekend (Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd October 2011) for some essential maintenance. Most of the ChEMBL services will still run through this period from our London Data Centers.

    The key exception to this is the Structure-based Druggability Service and Portal (www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/drugebility).

    Further details of the shutdown can be found here.

  • Registration Open for EMBO Chemical Biology 2012


    Registration is open for the (excellent) EMBO Chemical Biology 2012 meeting.