• Conference: Chemical Biology 2010, Heidelberg, Sept. 22-25 2010

    After a fantastic TACBAC 2010 conference in Hinxton, the next conference that I have a small part in organizing is the EMBO conference, Chemical Biology 2010 at EMBL Heidelberg, running from 22nd to 25th September this year. The conference will cover a broad area of approaches and methods used in Chemical Biology including molecular imaging and switching tools, computational and structural approaches, screening methods, molecular engineering, and novel synthetic methods as applied to biological questions.

    The link to further details is here.

  • Are there too many scientists?

    Yesterday was yet another bad, bad news day for scientists working in the pharmaceutical industry. Our best wishes to all those affected and hopefully there will be suitable and satisfying jobs out there for everyone. Clearly there are fewer jobs than there once were, and competition for work and market forces are reducing both salaries and career options.

    Scientific American have recently published a thought provoking article entitled 'Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?'. Contrast and compare to the UK Government report in yesterdays post....

  • A Vision For UK Research?

    The UK's Council for Science and Technology (a government appointed body with responsibility for looking at Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) issues that cut across government departments) has just released a report - A Vision for UK Research, which recommends increased public sector funding of R&D, with one of the cited reasons to maintain international competitiveness. The recommendations are thought provoking and will probably chime well with most 'career scientists'.

    We are entering interesting times in the UK for both the development of science and also the science area as a career.

  • NIH, FDA and personalised medicine

    Came across an interesting presentation on the internet from Francis Collins on Personalised Medicine, related to the recently announced NIH and FDA collaboration on regulatory and translational science. Lots of nice examples, and a focus on translational science. Here is the presentation.

  • Beta-testing new version of kinase SARfari


    A new data load for kinase SARfari screening data has just been completed. There is a significant growth in both the number of inhibitors (28,016 vs. 17,028), and the number of assay data-points (147,478 vs. 68,861).

    It is available here

    Remember it is a test version only, and if you do find any problems, please mail them...

    Finally, there is a funny story behind the picture, which will emerge over the next few blog posts.

  • Kinase Inhibitors in Clinical Development

    We have just restarted serious activity for Clinical Development stage compounds for chembl, with the first set dusted down being the protein kinases. So, we have updated the data from the usual sources and now have (as of Feb 2010) 244 clinical stage kinase inhibitors. These break down as follows for highest reported clinical phase (however, since many of these inhibitors are for oncology applications, there is a higher fraction than typical of Phase 2 compounds.


    The breakdown of targets is as follows.

    If anyone with experience of kinase inhibitor development would care to cast their eyes over these data and feedback/correct errors and so forth, before we load it all into kinase SARfari, please get in touch.

  • 2009 New Drugs - Clarification on Dysport/AbobotulinumtoxinA

    We have had a couple of mails about the exclusion of AbobotulinumtoxinA (aka Dysport) as a new NME in some of our analyses of drugs for 2009. This is a subtle case, and our treatment of AbobotulinumtoxinA is as follows - but basically it is not an NME.

    Recently the FDA required that, due to the non-interchangeability, and potential safety issues of Botulinum Toxin A products from different manufacturers, that differing non-proprietary names were required for these products, despite the fact that nominally they contain the same active ingredient (in this case a large protein therapeutic). So Botox, marketed by Allergan, now uses the non-proprietary name onabotulinumtoxinA, while for Dysport (approved during 2009) from Ipsen, uses the non-proprietary name abobotulinumtoxinA. Since they essentially just differ by manufacturer, and not by active ingredient, we have not considered Abobotulinum toxin as being a new NME approval.

  • Two New Posts within the ChEMBL Team

    We have recently been awarded an Innovative Medicines Initiative grant in the area of predictive toxicology - the project is called eTox. This is a very exciting project and will build an unprecedented collaborative database of rat toxicology data for a large number of clinical development candidates. It is also a chance to work in close collaboration with a network of some of the leading European academics, SMEs and pharmaceutical companies.

    We have two posts available under this funding. The first is for a scientist with experience of datamining and analysis of data, preferably with good experience of bioinformatics or chemoinformatics. The second post is for an informatician to build a data repository, and then populate this with deposited curated toxicology data.

    If you have any questions about the jobs, please feel free to mail us.

    The deadline for applications is 14th March 2010.