I have been in sunny but chilly San Diego since Saturday for the American Chemical Society meeting. I co-chaired a full session on polypharmacology on sunday – Perhaps Ehrlichs magic bullet hypothesis is now long dead, we are well into the next paradigm. Embrace the fact that drugs hit many targets..long may they be a source of new leads for other diseases or just new ideas. I presented a brief analysis of the drugs that are discovered through HTS screening of various FDA drug libraries. There is definitely a need for someone to track these ‘discoveries’ and our effort so far have been pretty basic.
Sunday afternoon I participated in the CINF flash talks chaired by Rajarshi Guha from the NIH. This was a new experience. 8 min talk..literally gone in a flash. This time I presented the work Antony Williams and I have done on putting together various wiki databases. a great diversity of talk topics and sadly a tiny audience.
Yesterday I gave an overview of how I thought mobile apps could be used for drug discovery. I gave the whole talk from the iPad (slides converted to PDF and presented from the iBooks app) as well as a demo of the ODDT app. This session was full of great talks by Steven Muskal (Eidogen-Sertanty), Woody Sherman (schrodinger), Alex Clark (Molecular Materials Informatics) and Antony Williams (Royal Society of Chemistry). What struck me was that so many of the app pieces are in place for non chemists to do chemistry by app, learn chemistry if you will, and deliver some ideas that others could actually make. A bit of a stretch?
It was a surprise that there were so few younger chemists in the audience for the apps session. Also as I live tweeted during talks I realized that out of all the attendees there are very few live tweeters. Maybe next time the will be more.
3 more talks to go but today it’s time for a break to catch up on work. I will report on the last few days at the end of the week.
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