Collaborative Chemistry

One has to ask how often history repeats itself. In the case of NCATS its at least every year.

Last year a few of us brought to light the case of the drug company (industry) provided compounds looking for a repurposing home on the NCATS website, which oddly enough did not have any structures.  This provided fodder for several blogs here, here, here and  lead to a paper and our own efforts to find the structures with Chris Southan and Antony Williams described here.

Now today I see a tweet

NCATS‏@ncats_nih_gov20h

NCATS wants you! Pharma and biotech partners are needed to further develop and commercialize NCATS technologies: http://1.usa.gov/13cKzGv

and I respond

Sean Ekins‏@collabchem2h

@ncats_nih_gov will be interesting to see if you get nibbles, most assume pharma wants later stage cpds – partner with disease foundations?

Then Chris Southan responds

Christopher Southan‏@cdsouthan1h

@collabchem @ncats_nih_gov  see http://cdsouthan.blogspot.se/2013/05/ncats-vice-versa-cpds-more-blinded.html …

It would appear that again NCATS are listing compound IDs without structures..so again its left for scientists to do the grunt work to figure out the correct molecule structure and ID match. This is absolutely nuts. Here we are funding NCATS out of our taxes and they are fishing for pharmas to partner their molecules and not even providing structures. Will they ever learn?

Perhaps if they provided structures of the molecules it might help them partner the molecules and rare and neglected disease groups might even be interested..still sticking with my tweet, pharmas likely to be more interested in later stage compounds..This feels like the movie GroundHog day.