Eduticles » ChEMBL - Open Access Drug Discovery And Medicinal Chemistry Data

We will host a web-meeting demonstration of the chembldb web-interface on Monday 29th March at 3pm GMT. If you are interested in joining, please email us on this link for dial-in details. We will be using the webhuddle software for the demo so it may be worth trying it out on your machine beforehand.

We will host another web-meeting walkthrough of the chembldb core database schema on Tuesday 30th March at 3pm GMT. If you are interested in joining, please email us on this link for dial-in details. We will be using the webhuddle software for the demo so it may be worth trying it out on your machine beforehand.

The world is a really small place, as these pictures of the EBI reveal. Many thanks to the photographer Tim Nugent.

Here is a plot of the number of WO published patents that contain the words 'kinase' and 'inhibitor' published during a particular year - these were found using the excellent SIMPLE patent system. Of course this is not the same as a hand crafted, expert search of the protein kinase inhibitor patent field, but all I wanted to do here was to see the pattern over time of publication dates.

As can be seen, there is a sharp ramp-up in published patents over the period 1997-2001 - which will correspond to a filing period of 1995-2000 (patents are typically published 18 months after filing). From around 2003 onwards the total number of published patents per year have been relatively constant.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.