NCI - UsefulChem Link
Earlier this week, I was contacted by Daniel Zaharevitz, Chief of the Information Technology Branch of the Developmental Therapeutics Program at the National Cancer Institute. He is also involved with the NIH Roadmap Molecular Libraries Initiative. We had a very interesting talk about Open Science and what kind of further impact it could have in drug development. Lets just say that we are on the same page on this issue and I'm really impressed with what Dan is trying to achieve.
The first thing we are going to do is start shipping the compounds we make for an automatic screening of 60 cell lines for tumor inhibitory activity. No, these compounds were not designed for this purpose but the screening service Dan offers is free and we might just learn something.
Also, if someone has a model of tumor suppression and would like to make a suggestion (hint, hint), I would be happy to re-prioritize the order in which we make our molecules. The UsefulChem project is designed to be flexible that way.
The Ugi reaction we are using is very simple and amenable to combinatorial approaches from commercially available compounds. Many of these compounds have probably been made and tested by pharmaceutical companies but the results are sitting behind a firewall.
Dan will also be visiting me in Philly next week.
Thanks to Peter Murray-Rust for catalyzing this connection!
posted by Jean-Claude Bradley @ Sunday, April 22, 2007
2 comments
2 Comments:
It's kind of interesting having your discussions blogged. It is one of the reasons I contacted you. In the same way that having your experiments open and online provides the opportunity for other chemists to learn and interact, I hope that having these discussions on line will provide an opportunity for other chemists to learn about ways to interact with NCI. And importantly for us, NCI can learn about things we can do to make the service more useful to chemists. The cell line screen has been operational for over 15 years. (And I am not the one offering it. It is the Developmental Therapeutics Program.) The data has been shown to be useful in evaluating mechanism of cell growth inhibition by compounds. Rather than try to explain it all now, I think I will bring in details as each stage of the process is reached. If anyone reading is interested in submitting their own compounds, see this page. I look forward to some interesting interactions.
DanZ
Dan,
Yes - it would be great to have as much discussion in public as possible. If you want to put or modify anything on the UsefulChem wiki just request an account on the main page.
Hopefully we'll get some additional compound contributors from this..
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