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Industry and academic actors from chemistry world agree on new bioactive molecule standard

Representatives of pharmaceutical companies, data resource providers and academic groups have come to an agreement on a new standard for describing the effect of a compound on a biological entity, detailed in a new study published in Nature Review Drug Discovery. Although pha...

Representatives of pharmaceutical companies, data resource providers and academic groups have come to an agreement on a new standard for describing the effect of a compound on a biological entity, detailed in a new study published in Nature Review Drug Discovery. Although pharmaceutical, biotech and academic groups generate a huge amount of data about the biological properties of molecules such as drugs, pesticides and food additives, this useful data often goes unreported, resulting in repetition and the needless waste of time and resources. Today, crucial data are often missing from published literature or are reported in an unstructured format. Enter the Minimum Information About a Bioactive Entity (MIABE), the solution to this problem proposed by an international consortium of actors from both industry, via pharmaceutical companies and non-profit and commercial biological data providers, and the world of academia, led by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)-European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in the United Kingdom. This new standard is effectively the definition of reporting guidelines for bioactive entities and its arrival means the floodgates have now been opened and a stream of information about small molecules will become available in the public domain. For the chemistry world, this will in turn hopefully result in major developments in drug discovery. The team hopes that the new standard will make it possible to enhance the exchange of public data on drug discovery success and attrition. Research into the standard also received a boost from EU funding to the tune of EUR 1,476,384 under the 'Proteomics Standards Initiative and International Molecular Exchange' (PSIMEx) project, part of the 'Health' Thematic area of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The PSIMEx project, which runs until 2013, supports various projects that contribute to the overall aim of making molecular interaction data computationally accessible. The project partners, from China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, plan to further develop the existing standard for molecular interactions developed by the HUPO Proteomics Standards Initiative, a standard developed in 2002 that defines community standards for data representation in proteomics to facilitate data comparison, exchange and verification. The PSIMEx project also aims to promote standard implementation in the entire chain from experiment planning via data formatting and analysis to data representation in journal publications and public databases. This involves organising user training on minimum requirements for publication of molecular interaction data, as well as training and exchange for curation staff working on the participating databases. The MIABE standard architects emphasise that in order to analyse any collected data properly it is essential that they are comparable. A deeper understanding of what makes successful drugs work can be gained by putting together data from a large number of drug discovery programmes, as Dr John Overington, from the EMBL-EBI explains: 'We hope that MIABE will make possible an order-of-magnitude increase in the amount of data available for analysis. Experience with other standards has shown that as more groups come to adopt them, the amount of useable data available to researchers snowballs.' The development of this new standard also brings with it economic implications. 'The increased availability of standards-compliant data will help companies to streamline their decision-making processes,' comments another study author Dr Dominic Clark, from EMBL-EBI. 'Industry is becoming increasingly reliant on data in the public domain. Having a set of principles and standards will make data integration simpler and help to control costs.' But getting data into the public domain is not just about knowing about the 'successful' biological entities. Identifying and developing molecules with useful bioactive properties, such as pharmaceutical agents, pesticides and food additives, has never been an easy one and only a handful of investigational new drugs will make it through to the approved clinical usage stage, but scientists need to know about those molecules that didn't make the final cut, and why. Some molecules don't make it on to the market due to a lack of efficacy or unexpected side effects and toxicity, for example. Pesticides that have negative side effects for other organisms beyond their original target and food additives such as plant sterols that are subject to very strict regulations are also frequently blocked. A recent example that shows the positive effects of having data on bioactive compounds widely available was the release of data by pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis, as well as St Jude Children's Research Hospital, in the United States, on over 14,000 compounds that are known to be active against the parasite responsible for transmitting malaria. Now this data is available in the ChEMBL database, a database of bioactive drug-like small molecules that was developed with support from both FP7 and the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI). Data from this database was used in a chemogenomic screen that identified Schistosoma mansoni proteins against which existing drugs may be active. As a result, this provided hope that known therapeutics could be used to treat the neglected tropical disease schistosomiasis, which currently affects 210 million people in 76 countries worldwide. With the development of the MIABE standard chemists hope success stories like this one will be a more regular occurrence.For more information, please visit:European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)-European Bioinformatics Institute:http://www.ebi.ac.uk/

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