Saturday, November 07, 2009

Warren DeLano - In Memoriam

The family of Warren Lyford DeLano has created a "In Memorium" page and blog. Please share your memories there !


As many others, I am shocked, sad, and are left with the impression having lost something important. We never met in real-life, but exchanged thoughts in several forums, eMails, and other new generation media. He was a natural leader in the life science informatics community (PyMol, open source) and paved a way for many of us. He will never be forgotten !

Twitter reactions
Wordle: Warren DeLano Died - Twitter reactions

Blog reactions
Wordle: Warren DeLano Died - Blog reactions

Monday, September 14, 2009

Innovation 2.0 - Looking for a strategy in drug design and health care?

"You can’t control what you can't measure." [Tom DeMarco]
I am strongly believing in people-centric innovation for drug design and health care. Still, we have serious challenges to solve before this can happen, and a lot of them are in-vivo, not in-silico:
  1. Get rid of the negative group dynamics.
  2. Accept information overload and embrace collaboration.
  3. Bridge silos, e.g. chemical data silos, but also break-down legal or license hurdles, e.g. by using micropayments.
Please find below the slides and handout for my talk in October on the BioIT World conference. The conference will cover a large range of life science topics, e.g. -omics, semantics, technology, bioinformatics, life science software, collaboration platform, etc. This is all very exciting and I am looking forward to those talks and meeting people in real life.

Please let me know, if you agree with the challenges, and what you have experienced for using collaboration solutions in a commercial setting. I am a technological geek (tekki), and here I am especially interested in the opinions of the non-tekkis !

Talk to you soon ...

See also

Thursday, September 10, 2009

50 million chemicals, and accelerating - chemical patent overload?

(via NatureNews) As reported by the Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) have they reached 50 million registered chemical entities.

Here some numbers to think about
  • CAS needed 33 years for registering the first 10 million compounds, that is one new compound every 101.5 seconds.
  • the last 9 months CAS registered 10 million compounds, in other words, every 2.3 seconds a new compound was created !
  • So, chemistry has improved its efficiency 44 times !
This resulted in a drastically increasing patenting rate as mentioned by David Bradley.

O.k. what happens now to your actual lead structure series?
  1. Don't panic! Just get enough money for mining CAS directly ... mmmh ... just kidding.
  2. Second choice? Extract all 50 million structures from PDF patents, which is really difficult and noisy, I mean it.
  3. Third choice? Just get back to your binding energy modelling, solvation modelling, and PK modelling and assume the structures are patentable. Under the bounded rational drug design paradigm is this statistically a reasonable approximation. But wait ! In contrast to statistics (where the average counts) is one patent enough to kill your lead series. ... o.k. ... now you can panic !
See also