The DREAM consortium has run a number of predictive modeling challenges and the latest one on predicting small molecule synergies has just been published. The dataset that was provided included baseline gene expression of the cell line (OCI-LY3), expression in presence of compound (2 concentrations, 2 time points), dose response data for 14 compounds and […]
Metabolite Similarity & Dirty Compounds
Edit 10/9/14 – Updated statistics for the 1024 bit fingerprints There’s been some discussion about a paper by O’Hagan et al that have proposed a Rule of 0.5 that states that 90% of approved drugs exhibit a Tanimoto similarity > 0.5 to one or more human metabolites. Their analysis is based on metabolites listed in […]
rinchi – An R package to generate InChI’s and InChI Keys
While trying to update rcdk on CRAN it was pointed out to me that usage of the library resulted in modifications to the users home directory. Specifically, this occurred when generating InChI‘s. The CDK makes use of jni-inchi, which in turn depends on JNATI which enables Java code to work with native libraries in a platform […]
Predicting Synergy from Lipophilicity?
I recently came across a paper by Yilancioglu et al that described a method to predict drug synergies using only lipophilicity. In effect, it claimed to predict synergy based purely on a physicochemical property and independent of target or pathway information. Their results suggest that combinations of two lipophilic drugs had a greater tendency to […]
Fingerprint Similarity Searches in MongoDB
A few of my recent projects have involved the use of MongoDB, primarily for the ease afforded by a schemaless environment. Sometime back I had investigated the use of MongoDB to store chemical structure data, though those efforts did not actually query structures per se; instead they queried for precomputed numeric or text properties. So […]