Wednesday, June 16
Collaboration in Drug Development and Chemistry
9:00 am Chair’s Remarks
9:05 Experience with ChEMBL: An Open Access Drug Discovery Database
Anna Gaulton, Ph.D., Senior Data Integration Development Officer, European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
The ChEMBL database is an Open Access database of drug discovery relevant data, originally part of a biotechnology company’s internal proprietary technology, but recently transferred to the public domain. Currently the database contains functional, ADMET and binding data for over 500,000 distinct compounds.
9:35 Experience with and Prospects for Collaborative Drug Safety Databases
Darrell Abernethy, Ph.D., Associate Director, Drug Safety, Office of Clinical Pharmacology, Food and Drug Administration
The current paradigm for clinical drug safety is pharmacoepidemiology, which may or may not be informed by pre-clinical safety signals. The emergence of systems biology and integrative pharmacology offer new tools to inform clinical drug safety prospectively. While these disciples are at an early stage, there is the opportunity to create a new paradigm for drug safety. As these tools evolve, close collaboration among the pharmaceutical industry, the academic and research community and the drug regulatory community is essential to speed development and maximize the potential of this new paradigm. Ways to foster and accelerate this collaboration will also be discussed.
10:05 Networking Refreshment Break, Poster and Exhibit Viewing
10:35 The Pistoia Alliance: Pre-Competitive Collaboration in the Discovery and Pre-Clinical Domains
Ramesh Durvasula, Ph.D., Director, Chemistry Informatics, Research Informatics & Automation, Bristol-Myers Squibb
An Open Source initiative (http://pistoiaalliance.org) has been established to provide the foundation of data standards, ontologies and associated web-services to enable the Pharmaceutical discovery workflow through common business terms, relationships and processes. Initial focus has been on chemistry, biological screening and sample logistics. Every pharma company and software vendor is challenged by the technical inter-conversion, collation and interpretation of drug/agrochemical discovery data and as such, there is a vast amount of duplication, conversion and testing that could be reduced if a common foundation of data standards, ontologies and web-services could be promoted and ideally agreed within a non-proprietary and non-competitive framework. This would allow interoperability between a traditionally diverse set of technologies to benefit the healthcare sector. Current progress, learnings and how companies, academics and others can participate in this approach will be described.
11:00 Management and Mining of Pre-Competitive Translational Research Data
Sandor Szalma, Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, Research & Development Informatics, Centocor R&D, Inc.
J&J Pharma R&D has been investing in translational research by establishing a set of translational and biomarker groups and focusing on the management and mining of the data emanating from integrative settings crossing the drug discovery and development stages. One of the deliverables of this enhanced governance structure was the development of a translational medicine informatics infrastructure. In this talk we will present the evolution of this informatics infrastructure which is now based on multiple open-source platforms (i2b2, Gene Patterns, Lucene, etc.) and how this system can form the basis of pre-competitive sharing and mining of clinical and associated molecular data.
11:30 Panel Discussion
12:00 Close of Conference
For more details on the conference, please contact:
Phillips Kuhl
President
Cambridge Healthtech Institute
T: (+1) 781-972-5410
E: pkuhl@healthtech.com
For partnering and sponsorship information, please contact:
Arnie Wolfson
Manager, Business Development
Cambridge Healthtech Institute
T: (+1) 781-972-5431
E: awolfson@healthtech.com