GSK Teams Up with Online Communities to Invent New Treatments for Malaria
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has decided to team up with well known public domain data providers, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the U.S.-based informatics service provider Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD). Their aim is to make available important scientific information of over 13,500 compounds that eventually contributes to the invention of new malaria treatments.
Thus, for the first time in history, a pharmaceutical company has contributed the structures of a large number of compounds. It was achieved through the partnership between the web hosts and their expert research tools which the researchers will get for free of cost. Researchers usually host this on websites which includes top quality scientific data about the molecules from GSK’s own compound library. These molecules have exhibited potency against the very dangerous malaria parasite, P. falciparum.
Patrick Vallanc who is the head of drug discovery at GSK said, “We are delighted that EMBL-EBI, NLM and CDD have joined us in this worthwhile endeavor to apply the principles of open source to drug discovery for malaria. Defeating this disease will require many scientific minds working together. We hope researchers from across the world will now use this information to drive further studies, and that other groups from pharmaceutical industry to academia will add their information to this on-line resource.”
John Overington who is the leader of the EMBL-EBI’s ChEMBL team said, “We’re proud to be able to add value to the GSK data by incorporating it into ChEMBL and linking it with a vast array of information that could help researchers to find new treatments for malaria.”
Steve Bryant who is the head of NLM’s PubChem said, “By making these data available through public resources such as PubChem, GSK is greatly facilitating the research process.”
Barry A. Bunin who is the CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery said, “In decades of medical breakthroughs from Big Pharmas, this is the first time a group is openly sharing all the chemical and biological data - not just the few hits.”
This kind of data is a stepping stone to develop new medicines. Scientists can conduct more extensive research on these compounds to discover new drugs by analyzing the
structure of the compound and information about where they influence the malaria parasite.
Posted 1 year, 11 months, 3 weeks, 6 days, 18 hours, 46 minutes ago
