Advances in information technology have shaped not only how we find or share information, but also how we make new medicines. A project just funded by the National Institutes of Health plans to take computer-aided drug design to the next level.
The University of Michigan will lead the effort to expand and enhance the molecular data needed to develop computer programs that more accurately predict potential drug candidates. The data will be housed in a Web-based resource that the scientific community and others interested in this information can access for free. The resource is estimated to receive up to $5 million over five years from NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). ...
Chemist Heather Carlson, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan’s College of Pharmacy will oversee the creation and operation of the new Community Structure-Activity Resource, which will include detailed molecular information about proteins that bind small, drug-like molecules called ligands. ...
To build the resource, Carlson and her co-investigators at the University of Michigan will gather molecular data from existing resources and will work with others to generate new data. A major activity will be the collection of unpublished data from pharmaceutical company scientists, who emphasized both the need for this information and a willingness to share it during public meetings leading to the establishment of the new resource.
The team also will draw from published literature as well as from Carlson’s Binding MOAD (for "Mother of All Databases"), which contains more than 11,000 protein-ligand complexes, and the PDBbind database, which was developed by co-investigator Shaomeng Wang, Ph.D., and provides experimentally measured binding data. The team will conduct experiments to address any gaps in the data and sponsor community-wide events to facilitate collaboration among scientists. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 10/21/2008 07:46:00 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.
