Drug-Target Networks & Polypharmacology

I came across Takigawa et al where they address polypharmacology by investigating drug-target pairs.  Their approach is to simultaneously identify substructures from the ligand and subsequences from the target and combine this information to suggest drug-target pairs that represent some form of polypharmacology.  More specifically their hypothesis is that “polypharmacological principles” are embedded in a […]

Cheminformatics – the New World for TCS?

A few weeks back Aaron Sterling posted a review of the Handbook of Cheminformatics Algorithms (in which I have a chapter). Aaron notes … my goal for the project changed from just a review of a book, to an attempt to build a bridge between theoretical computer science and computational chemistry … The review/bridging was […]

What Has Cheminformatics Done for You Lately?

Recently there have been two papers asking whether cheminformatics or virtual screening in general, have really helped drug discovery, in terms of lead discovery. The first paper from Muchmore et al focuses on the utility of various cheminformatics tools in drug discovery.  Their report is retrospective in nature where they note that while much research […]

The Quest for Universal Descriptors – Not There Yet

A major component of QSAR modeling is the choice of molecular descriptors that are used in a model. The literature is replete with descriptors and there’s lots of software (commercial and open source) to calculate them. There are many issues related to molecules descriptors, (such as many descriptors being correlated and so on) but I […]