Gabriele Costantino

Editorial

Dear Colleagues,

Modern drug discovery, similarly to other border disciplines, relies more and more on the availability, processing and mining of high quality data. Recent years have seen a growing availability of databases annotated with a variety of biological data, and for the first time academic researchers are beginning to have access to data generated under industry settings and standards. There is the risk, however, that the ability to generate data does not parallel the capacity to manage them, and, more importantly, to transform them into knowledge for medicinal chemists.
In this context, we publish in this issue of MedChemWatch a Perspective article originally published in the 2011 EFMC yearbook. In this perspective, Niklas Blomberg, Gerhard Ecker, Richard Kidd, Barned Mons, and Byrn Williams-Jones comments on the opportunity that the semantic web technologies are offering to the medicinal chemistry community, and present the example of the Open Pharmacological Concept Triple Store (OpenPHACTS) towards the creation of an open pharmacological space.

Continuing our presentation of leading European labs, we present in this issue the laboratory of Prof. Danijel Kikelj, at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Gloria Cristalli, director of the ESMEC-Urbino, the EFMC-accredited European School of Medicinal Chemistry, reports on the 31st edition of the School, which has been held on July, 3-8.
The Second Summer School of Medicinal Chemistry, organized by the Spanish Society of Medicinal Chemistry has been granted this year as a EFMC event, and Maria Luz Lopez-Rodriguez and Javier Fernardez-Gadea report on the scientific outcome of the meeting.

As usual, you will find the columns on news from member societies and from the EC of the EFMC. Indeed, among the various and interesting events that will take place this year (and you will find the updated list in the ‘EFMC events’ section, as well as in the Meeting Calendar section of www.efmc.info), the 4th edition of ASMC, which will be held in St. Petersburg, August 21-25, 2011.

 

Gabriele Costantino
Editor

 


Editor

Gabriele Costantino
Univ. of Parma, IT

Editorial Committee

Erden Banoglu
Gazi Univ., TR

Lucija Peterlin Masic
Univ. of Ljubljana, SI

Leonardo Scapozza
Univ. of Geneve, CH

Wolfgang Sippl
Univ. Halle-Wittenberg, DE

Sarah Skerratt
Pfizer, Sandwich, UK

Executive Committee

Gerhard F. Ecker President
Roberto Pellicciari Past Pres.
Koen Augustyns Secretary
Rasmus P. Clausen Treasurer
Javier Fernandez Member
Mark Bunnage Member
Peter Matuys Member

For more information please contact info@efmc.info

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