- From: Matthias Samwald <samwald@gmx.at>
- Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 15:21:38 +0200
- To: <kc28@email.med.yale.edu>, "Tim Clark" <twclark@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu>
- Cc: "M. Scott Marshall" <marshall@science.uva.nl>, <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
> Speaking of national boundaries, I wonder if alternative medicine (e.g., > herbal > medicine) would also be of interest to this community. For example, > Huperzine > is a drug derived from the herb Huperzia serrata. I also wonder if there > are > hypotheses regarding the study of herbs in the possible treatment of > neurological diseases. I would also be very motivated to help in this kind of research. Specifically, Huperzine A would be a very interesting use-case for our developments. It is a herbal compound with a history in folk medicine and is available OTC in most countries, yet it rivals the effectiveness of currently leading Alzheimer medications such as Tacrine. It also has a dual mode of action that does not only involve acetylcholinesterase inhibition, but also modulation of the NMDA receptor. The implications of this for the treatment of Alzheimer's are still a rather hot topic. The integration of knowledge from traditional medicine, plant taxonomy/phylogeny/biochemistry and receptor binding databases (PDSP Ki database, IUPHAR) could lead to the identification of some extremely novel therapeutic strategies. Finding candidate molecules in such a way might be much more effective than weeding through libraries of compounds generated by combinatorial synthesis etc. The challenge lies in the integration of some very heterogenous datasets that come from vastly different disciplines, which is exactly the field of research where Semantic Web technologies are most effective. I guess the major problem for this kind of research is that there are no funding programmes that span China, the US and Asia... Cheers, Matthias Samwald DERI Galway, Ireland // Semantic Web Company, Austria http://www.deri.ie/ http://www.semantic-web.at/
Received on Monday, 26 May 2008 13:29:16 UTC