Bill Schu, Big Plans for Small Molecules, Genomics and Proteomics, January/February 2005. Excerpt: 'As part of its Roadmap for Medical Research, NIH is embarking on a sweeping series of initiatives to equip academic researchers with the same toolset available to most pharmaceutical companies. The effort, called the Molecular Libraries Initiative, is likely to have a profound influence on our understanding of biological pathways....What if that small molecule that didn't show much promise could have led to a cure for breast cancer? What if a small molecule that interacts with a gene and shows some toxicity could interact with some proteins in a biologically beneficial manner? Christopher Austin, MD, senior advisor for translational research for the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has perhaps been more haunted by these possibilities than most. In his previous position as a senior researcher at Merck & Co., he was familiar with the kinds of information that large pharmaceutical companies had access to, but that academic researchers did not. Of particular interest to Austin was information surrounding how small molecules interacted with proteins, DNA, and RNA. NIH is banking on the fact that academic researchers, if given access to heretofore unavailable libraries of organic chemical compounds or small molecules, can use those molecules to better understand the biological pathways associated with human health....Now, the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) is poised to answer those questions. A coordinated effort will include at least four distinct groups within NIH, a handful of academic screening centers, and the creation of PubChem, a new [open-access] database that is to house hundreds of thousands of molecular structures. Many officials within NIH believe it is the most ambitious undertaking the group has embarked on since the completion of the map of the human genome.' (PS: PubChem data will be in the public domain.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/15/2005 08:17:00 AM.
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.
