The Synaptic Leap

There may be members of this community who do not yet have direct experience of developing a new medicine from concept to pharmacy shelf.  Be assured, there is a lot more to it than "just" the synthesis of the API.  Why not take advantage of a Free ACS Webcast on May 6, 2010 Thurs 2:00-3:00 PM ET
From a Beaker to a Bottle: Overview of the Drug Discovery and Development Process for Small Molecule Therapeutics
A free webcast from the American Chemical Society as part of their Professional Growth and Development Series. Learn about the drug development process and find out how long it takes, how much it costs, and the odds of getting a new drug approved.

TDI/TSL's paper entitled "A kernel for the Tropical Disease Initiative" is published today in Nature Biotech. We're very pleased an open source project has been published in such a high-ranking journal, and we hope this stimulates the interest of the scientific community in what's possible. Naturally, we want people to contribute to the science!
This paper will shortly be followed by a full article in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
The kernel may be explored at TDI, with discussion/project planning happening here at TSL.

Following on from last week's news from GSK comes a potentially very important announcement from Merck about Sage, a large deposition of biological data and software to the commons. Links and discussion here.

The Scott and O'Donnell labs at IUPUI have published an interesting set of articles in the latest issue (vol 11, issue 1) of the Journal of Combinatorial Chemistry on Distributed Drug Discovery. They're open access articles. The idea is to show that chemical synthesis can be done by multiple labs for the creation of drug-like compounds, and that there is reproducibility between the different sites (from the US to Poland). This is obviously an important requirement for any distributed research effort. Jean-Claude's Open Notebook concept is of course aiming at exactly that.

A quick status update. While we were successful in getting our grant with the Australian Research Council and the World Health Organisation, we have so far been unable to formulate a contract that is mutually acceptable to all parties. Negotiations are continuing, but this explains the lack of recent activity coming from our lab on the schisto projects - we don't have the money yet! Fingers crossed this situation will resolve itself positively in the near future.

The Guardian Weekly's a lovely thing (particularly if you don't live in the UK). Two articles in yesterday's edition caught my eye.

The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has funded two centers for conducting structural gemomics studies on Infectious disease organisms.

There are two centers, one called SSGCID (Seattle Structurals Genomics Center for Infectious Diseases) run by Seattle Biomedical Research Institue (SBRI). Another is CSGID (Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases).

Both centers are seeking target suggestions from the worldwide community. Make target requests at:

http://www.ssgcid.org/home/Community.asp

-Bartrum

We've been successful in securing a large government grant with an open source component. The 3-year project concerns the enantioselective synthesis of PZQ for a low price, with the World Health Organisation as partner. (PDF of the Uni Sydney outcomes is here). The funding comes from the Australian Research Council (the main government funding agency in Australia). We wrote the proposal emphasising the possibilities inherent in the open source approach to doing science, and we're very pleased that this was seen as positive by an official grant-funding agency. The funding will allow us to increase our efforts on using TSL to drive our project forward much faster.

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)

JoVE is an excellent peer reviewed video based open access Journal that is truly open source.

See this blog entry which includes a short trailer and various JoVE related links.