IU development might help speed discovery for pharmaceuticals

IU researchers at the School of Informatics and the IU Community Grids Lab have received a $49,000 grant from Microsoft Smart Clients for eScience for a project that could potentially give the pharmaceutical world the boost it needs to propel toward advancements in medical treatments via drugs. \nThe project will entail the creation of a new Web service and intelligent agent-based system enabling chemists to make quicker and more informed decisions while developing new prospective drugs. \n"One of the big problems in the pharmaceutical industry at the moment is that technological developments such as High Throughput Screening (the biological screening of hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds in a short time for biological activity) have resulted in a huge increase in the amount of information generated," said David Wild, assistant professor of informatics and IU researcher. "And the existing mechanisms for processing that information haven't really scaled up."\nAccording to Wild's written proposal for the project, many scientists have to deal with large volumes of many kinds of information coming from diverse sources, with limited experience of how this information can most effectively be interpreted and applied when in the developing stages of new drugs. \nIU's project will allow drug discovery information to be automatically and intelligently organized on a computer and relevant information "pushed" to scientists, Wild said. \nMicrosoft's donated funds will also add to the already present grant of $500,000 given to IU by the National Institutes of Health to launch the Chemical Informatics and Cyberinfrastructure Collaboratory, a new field of informatics to merge computer applications with chemistry. The project for the new Web-based system is already underway and is a section of the CICC research. \nWith a prototype expected within one year, Wild said this project is only one in an array of medical related research studies. \n"In particular, the School of Informatics is heavily researching chemical bioinformatics, bioinformatics, health informatics and laboratory informatics. Our biggest strength is the multidisciplinary approach to these problems," he said. \nThe first serious study conducted on the subject, Wild said the researchers hope to be able to make the process of gathering the information necessary for early stage drug discovery much easier. By doing this, the process of procuring new drugs eligible to treat some of modern medicine's greatest diseases, such as cancer, could be greatly accelerated.