Applying the Semantic Web to Drug Discovery and Development; Web Services

At our InnovationWell Autumn InterAction meetings (Philadelphia, USA, 
October 11,12) and (Basel, Switzerland, November 9,10) we are progressing 
our InnovationWell "Applying the Semantic Web to Drug Discovery and 
Development" program with two sessions concentrating on Web Services.

Generally we will not particularly concentrate on the IT and technical 
aspects of the semantic web (although they certainly will not be ignored 
:!) - rather the InnovationWell approach is more to engage in discussions 
on how to advance key business issues in drug discovery, development and 
safety incorporating practices, processes and technologies that enable 
innovation and progress in the life science and healthcare sectors.  (That 
said we have some very good technical people presenting in these web 
services sessions!)

Look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia or Basel.

best regards
Barry Hardy
InnovationWell Community of Practice Manager
http://innovationwell.net/
Douglas Connect, Switzerland
+41 61 851 0170 (office)


Applying the Semantic Web to Drug Discovery and Development

Applications of Web-based Services in Drug Discovery
Pharmaceutical research is under challenge to improve the choice, quality 
and safety of lead candidates. There is a clear need for an open discussion 
and an awareness of the requirements for a much more complex knowledge 
management and knowledge transfer between academic, government and 
commercial interests. The semantic web has the potential to make 
significant contributions to the drug discovery of the future but is at 
this time at an early development stage and there are only a few public 
tools for the data mining and sharing of chemical information.

Just a few years ago, the only imaginable way of doing in silico drug 
design - or, indeed, any cheminformatics research - was to use in-house and 
commercial software and databases. New developments in Web services however 
are offering today's researchers additional resources. Although 
cheminformatics admittedly lags far behind bioinformatics (where an 
enormous wealth of data and software is literally a click away), we are 
beginning to see some chemical resources in open access.

A goal for this program on "Web-based Services in Drug Design" is to 
present some of the possibilities of web-based tools and data and to lead 
into discussions on how can web services work for both the academic world 
and industry, while maintaining commercial, ip and security concerns? What 
potential impact could they have on discovery productivity? What are the 
best sustainable business models that can be applied to such services? How 
significant are the benefits of increased upstream and downstream knowledge 
flow due to services based on ontology frameworks? What are the key current 
hindrances to be overcome for the integration of web services into drug 
discovery in the chemical information area?

InterAction Meeting Session "Applications of Web-based Services in Drug 
Discovery"
Joint InnovationWell and eCheminfo Meetings
http://innovationwell.net/ and http://eCheminfo.com/

Philadelphia, USA, 11 October 2005
chaired by Marc Nicklaus (National Institutes of Health)

Presenters & Discussion Leaders:
A Web-based Chemoinformatics System for Drug Discovery, Brett Tounge 
(Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, LLC)
Web enabling technology for the design, enumeration, optimization and 
tracking of compound libraries, Brad Feuston (Merck)
Web-Based Services of the National Cancer Institute's CADD Group, Marc 
Nicklaus (NIH)
ZINC web services - providing 3D structures of purchasable compounds for 
virtual screening to humans and machines, John Irwin (UCSF)
Pubchem, Steve Bryant (NCBI)
Search-and-query Information System for the Study and Discovery of Novel 
Agents in the Treatment of Cancer, David Covell (National Cancer Institute)
High-performance Applications Based on Web Services: It's Not an Oxymoron. 
The Use of Web Services in the ABCD Drug Discovery Platform, Dmitrii 
Rassokhin (Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, LLC)


Basel, Switzerland, 10 November 2005
chaired by Kim Henrick (European Bioinformatics Institute)

Presenters & Discussion Leaders:
Investigating chemical trends in the context of ligand-protein complexes by 
using on-line data analysis directly on the web, Dimitris Dimitropoulos 
(European Bioinformatics Institute)
The Representation of Chemical Structures and its Application to Property 
Prediction, Johann Gasteiger (Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg)
Open Archives as a Route for the Capture, Dissemination and Access to 
Chemical Information, Simon Coles (University of Southampton)
Identification of biological units in protein crystals, Eugene Krissinel 
(European Bioinformatics Institute)
SWISS-MODEL Server and Repository: Web based resources for comparative 
protein structure modeling and their application in drug discovery, Torsten 
Schwede (University of Basel)


Further information on this program and others and on registration to 
attend the meetings or to access virtually is available through the 
InnovationWell and eCheminfo websites.


Barry Hardy, PhD
Douglas Connect, Switzerland
+41 61 851 0170 (office)
www.douglasconnect.com