Insider Update from THINK

THINK has given a short update of how things are going, status of the new client and their current priorities. Also mentioned is hopefully some good news.

• Confirmation of cancer hits, new certificates soon
• Collaborations old and new are highest priority
• A jump in client version possible, but is of lower priority

Quote THINK

We have some further confirmation of cancer hits and we anticipate some more certificates to be available in a month or so.

We are also endeavouring to work closely with our collaborators to help progress their research. Supporting our existing collaborations and seeking further collaborations is our current priority. While we are making some progress on further collaborations we need to find more resources to keep up with the rate of processing queries.

In other words, we have deliberated lowered the priority of software development and this will mean that some cosmetic issues slip down the priority list. We appreciate that this will be more apparent to members than computational issues but we believe the decision is the correct one. We will make a decision later this month whether to take 1.30d to beta test or jump to 1.31.

EDIT to add

Quote more from THINK

Perhaps I should re-iterate that in general we do not have collaborations in place for Proteome and Methodology queries. However, interest has been shown in some of the Proteome queries and results have been made available to collaborators.

Validation studies have shown that 10-30% of the hits usually show the predicted biological activity in laboratory tests. We also see exceptions to these normals (for instance in anti-cancer tests) which are explained by a misunderstanding of where the molecule needs to bind or the role of the protein.

In recently, the investment in drug discovery has decreased to release more funds for drug development - especially in the smaller biotechs and pharmaceuticals. An associated trend in the industry is a shift to collaboration and licensing agreements for molecules which have progressed into development - ideally through phase 1 clinical trials. The interest in licencing hits discovered or molecules which show the desired activity in laboratory tests has decreased. IMHO this is why some DC projects (such as UD/Oxford/Inhibox) have not yet achieved the expectations they set.

Academic collaboration potential is unchanged but generally progresses slower than industrial drug research. Finding more collaborators and supporting/laising with existing ones is time-consuming.