The Wellcome Trust has recently awarded a 5-year, UK£4.7 million grant to transfer well-structured chemogenomics data from the publicly listed company Galapagos to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The data will be incorporated into the Institute's collection of open-access data resources for biomedical research, and maintained by a team that is now being recruited....
Public databases of chemogenomics data have been established in recent years, the largest of which is PubChem, hosted by the US National Institutes of Health. However, lack of curation of publicly deposited data is a significant limitation to its utility (Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 7, 632–633; 2008). Also, as yet, the nature of the data — particularly data that could be valuable for drug discovery efforts — is not yet comparable with that available in typical pharmaceutical company databases (Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 5, 707–708; 2006).
The Wellcome Trust's acquisition of Galapagos's data is set to change this....
[T]here is growing excitement at the prospect of free access to the EMBL-EBI data for public drug discovery projects in areas such as neglected diseases....
"Another example," continues [Andrew Hopkins, professor of medicinal informatics at the University of Dundee], "is that we can use this large public data set to build large-scale virtual assay banks using machine learning processes that learn from the underlying data to predict new biological activities of compounds." ...
PS: For background, see our July 2008 post on the opening of the Galapagos data.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/12/2008 09:51:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
