The ChEMBL-og

We are again running the popular EMBL-EBI/Wellcome Trust Workshop on: Resources for Computational Drug Discovery.   It is being held on the Genome Campus near Cambridge between 2 nd and 6 th November 2015 . This will be the fourth year that we have run the course and each year we adapt it using feedback from previous participants.  It is designed for academic and industrial researchers who want to learn more about the principles and applications of computational chemical biology. There will be a chance to explore ways of accessing data as well as tools to analyse and visualise data.  There will also be lots of opportunities to apply these methods in practical, hands-on sessions and sessions will be led by academic as well as industrial tutors. More information, including the detailed programme, can be found here along with details of how to apply here . Don’t forget places are limited and the deadline for applications is Wednesday ...

After the very successful US East Coast ChEMBL Roadshow, we (Anne and George) will be on the road once again next week to spread the word on ChEMBL , myChEMBL and SureChEMBL . This time we will visit the US West Coast and specifically these venues: Tuesday 27th Jan: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Wednesday 28th: MolSoft/UCSD/Scripps, San Diego. See also here . Thursday 29th: IBM Research Centre, San Jose. Friday 30th: UCSF, San Francisco. If you are nearby and would like to attend or meet us for a chat, please get in touch.  We are grateful to SMSdrug.net for funding.  George & Anne

We've had a great response to our call for offers of venues to help us on a ChEMBL outreach tour, funded by the SMSDrug.net project. Things are shaping up pretty well, but we probably still have space for something in the Seattle area, and also space maybe for something in Philadelphia. We also will probably do both East and West coasts on the same trip, due to the very positive response. Get in touch if you are in the north-west, or north-east! jpo

We have some specific funding to do some training and outreach for ChEMBL (including UniChem and SureChEMBL). We would like to set something up on either the East or West coasts - the map above is the Google Analytics view for the blog (remember, we don’t run any analytics on the ChEMBL site, we respect your privacy). Based on this there are a couple of realistic options, and we can realistically only do one of these this year. West Coast - Seattle, Bay Area and San Diego.     or   East Coast - RTP, DC, Philly, New York, New Jersey and Boston. We are thinking of sometime in November or early December 2014. In order to make this work, we would need a local coordinator to arrange rooms, advertising to local interested users, and so forth, and also some assistance with logistics planning, and if you have access to special rates at hotels that would be great. We could run either a lecture/chalk-and-talk set of lectures at each location, or if you have ...

I'm giving a webinar on Drug Targets and Drug Targeting at 2-3 pm EDT on Thursday March 27th 2014 . Please note that Europe and the US have not aligned their saving times then, so the time difference will be 4 hours for the UK and Portugal ( 6pm GMT/WET ), and 5 hours for the most of the rest of western/central Europe ( 7pm CET ) and 6 hours for Finland and Eastern Europe ( 8pm EET ). I plan to cover quite a lot of ground, with quite a lot of new stuff and analyses. Registration is free on this link  http://acswebinars.org/drug-discovery , and the slides will be available after the meeting on this site too. Well done ACS!! The next in the series, on lead discovery on Thursday 24th April, is by our great friend and collaborator Tudor Oprea, so put that in your diary too. jpo

A couple of us are out in New Orleans for the ACS in a few weeks - if any ChEMBL users would like to meet up to get some training, ask questions, suggest improvements to what we do, or just grab a beer or coffee, we'd be very happy to do so. We arrive Sunday and leave Tuesday night. The picture is rather amusing, and looks a little like Mark and me, sort of. Credit for image is detailed in the image itself..... jpo and mark

A couple of weeks ago, I created a Doodle Poll to gauge interest in  hosting another series of Webinars, after the success of the ones we hosted last year. After a good response, these Webinars have now been organised and those who are interested in signing up to them, can do so here . Most of the webinars will only take 45mins and will give a good overview of the topic that they are talking about. You can watch and listen to them from the comfort of your own desk. The Doodle Poll signup section is hidden so only us here at ChEMBL Towers can see your personal details. However, I must stress that it is important that you leave your name and email address on the poll when you sign up, so that I can send on the connection details for the Webinar. Without this information, you will not be able to take part as I won't know where to send the connection details to. Any issues or queries, please do not hesitate to contact ChEMBL Help .

After the success of the last round of webinars , we have decided to run another set. However, we would like to gauge the interest in which topics would be most useful. The topics that have been suggested so far are: ChEMBL Overview - Basic interface walkthrough and searching ChEMBL Schema - Basic overview and ChEMBL changes ChEMBL Schema - Changes to ChEMBL target data model UniChem - Basic overview and searching Drug and USAN data content For this, a doodle poll has been set up which will allow you to register your interest. The poll is hidden, so no one will see your details, but it will allow us at ChEMBL Towers to see if the webinar would be worthwhile to set up. Please click on the link and let us know what you think. Additionally, if there are any webinars that we have not suggested, that you believe would be useful, please feel free to suggest these on the doodle poll, or email [email protected]

I'm out in Japan at the end of October this year - the week of October 28th 2013 for a scientific conference (the CBI Annual Conference). Japan is one of my favorite places in the whole world, and I have a routine of... browsing vintage hi-fi shops hunting out high-end capacitor and choke components,  eating eel  うなぎ  bento,  visiting CD stores (at least the format lives on in Japan, and the Obi Strips and enhanced content makes compelling browsing for an obsessive completist like me) going to  Bic Camera   株式会社ビックカメラ visiting Akihabara  秋葉原 . My schedule is currently empty for Wednesday 30th and Thursday 31st. I'd be delighted to visit and give a seminar, or maybe run a workshop on ChEMBL, so if you are interested in meeting up, or a visit, or an evening meal, let me know. jpo

For many classically 'undruggable' targets, there is sometimes the prospect of the discovery and optimisation of allosteric regulators, these can offer advantages in more selective target regulation, or improve the drug-like properties of compounds that bind to the allosteric site. However, allosteric regulators are often discovered via serendipity, and many screens are not configured optimally to identify allosteric regulators. As part of the SMSdrug.net grant we are involved in, there is an Allostery Workshop taking place at the University of Edinburgh on 4th December 2012 . The Workshop, sponsored by the British Council, involves an extensive delegation of scientists from Turkey led by Burak Erman, Koc University , Istanbul and will bring together a diverse area of disciplines including Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Informatics, Mathematics and Medicine. The program for the day will include presentations and poster session. Gerard Van Westen from the group...

Those of you who went on the course we ran this year will know how much fun it was - and from our perspective we're gonna keep on doing it till we get it right! So, once more, there is another chance to attend the course in 2013 - December 9 to 13th 2013 to be precise. So if you are interested, pencil the dates in your diaries now, and set an automatic alarm for four months before, and check out the full course details then. Of course, there are lots of other excellent courses in the same series, and the poster is available for download to display on your office wall here .

We are thinking of holding an annotatathon for clinical development stage compounds next July, here on campus at the EBI in Hinxton. At this event we will assign/curate efficacy targets for all the clinical stage compounds we have by then identified, simplifying the work by pre-clustering by chemical class/therapeutic area. Data generated during the event will be placed online immediately, and would of course be fully Open (none of this frustrating, online access only for us!). If there is interest in taking part, and contributing to this effort, let me know ! Depending on the level of interest, I may apply for funding to help with travel/accommodation. If you are interested in funding this we'd be delighted to help with this

I'm chairing a session at the ACS Spring meeting in New Orleans, in early April 2013 (the 7th thru 11th are the dates of the ACS meeting itself, but I'll probably be finished by the 9th) and am making a visit to Miami and Kentucky on the same trip. I can probably squeeze in two more lab visits if there is interest in a ChEMBL seminar (I would need to leave the US at the latest on Tuesday 16th April). I'll need to look into the practicalities of travel, and realistically they'll need to be in the South-East, but I'm pretty hardy in the air - I don't mind odd timed flights. So if there is any interest, let me know .

Sometimes, when something great happens, you've just got to find out, or tell the world, straight away, just like those proud fellas in the picture above. So, would there be an interest in an RSS feed of selected ChEMBL content? The sort of thing that is probably useful would be to have alerts for new bioactivity for an already existing ChEMBL compound, or for an already existing ChEMBL target/assay. Any comments/mail gratefully received. If there is interest, we'll integrate this into our plans for next year.

For anyone who wasn't able to attend the Japanese language webinar hosted by Kaz Ikeda, we have provided a link to its recording. This webinar covers the basic use of the ChEMBL database with a particular focus on the interface and searching. The YouTube clip can be found here: Japanese Webinar Any questions, please feel free to contact [email protected]

So, the course is over for another year. It was really good fun to do, and thanks to all the attendees who made it really rewarding for us all. There is plenty for us to think about in what you asked, and we'll try and include a few more things in the ChEMBL interface. An especial thanks goes out to our visiting lecturers - John Irwin, Noel O'Boyle, Markus Sitzmann, Val Gillet, Andreas Bender, Darren Green, Bissan Al-Lazikani and Mike Barnes. The picture is of (most of) the course attendees and the faculty on the last day, it was raining, much like every day that week, so an indoor photo. It looks cool. Till next year!!

This is a last call for people who would like to sign up for the "Schema & SQL Querying" webinar that will be hosted this Wednesday 27th June at 3.30pm (BST). It will be a 45 minute webinar that will take you through the ChEMBL schema and also how to use SQL queries to extract data from the database. Remember to register your interest in our webinars on the   Doodle Poll . Make sure that you leave your **email address** as well as your name so that we can send the connection details to you. Any problems, please contact [email protected].

Links to ChEMBL compounds from wikipedia have been there for some time, and now there is the target equivalent - for example here is the link to human thrombin .

The deadline of 7th May is quickly approaching to register for the course we are hosting, here in Hinxton - " Joint EMBL-EBI and Wellcome Trust Resources for Computational Drug Discovery ".  This joint EBI-Wellcome Trust  course  aims to provide the participants with the principles of chemical biology and how to use computational methods to probe, explore and modulate biological systems using chemical tools. The course will be comprised of a mixture of lectures and hands-on components. The conceptual framework will be covered, as well as direct practical experience of retrieving and analysing chemogenomics data. Participants will be able to do their own target analysis and identify appropriate chemical tools for probing biological systems of interest to them. Check out more details on the link, above.

For Japanese ChEMBLers, ケンブルのオンラインセミナー(ウェビナー)を5月30日、日本時間午後５時(UK午前９時)より行います。ケンブルの概要及びインタフェースでの検索方法などについて紹介します。当日は、日本人スタッフが日本語で行います。もちろん質問もOK。どなたでも参加可能です。 利用方法もとても簡単です(ブラウザ+音声は電話回線)。参加登録は、 Doodle (名前英語とメールアドレスを記入)か、または、担当者の 池田 までお問い合わせください。 他のウェビナーのスケジュールは こちら です(UK時間に注意)。ご要望があれば、今後も日本時間に合わせたウェビナーを検討致します。お気軽にご連絡ください。 また、5月11日に日本でケンブルデータベースの発表を行います。ご興味ある方は こちら をどうぞ。