Blogs

Curing Pharma: (1) Avoiding Hype-based Science

Thu, 06/02/2011 - 10:11 — Anthony Nicholls

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Jacques Tati’s masterful 1967 work Play Time, which describes an antiseptic, colorless and angular world of the future, a bleak world that only relents when the characters get together for a drink. It’s always been one of my favorite films, and it occurred to me recently that it can be seen as a metaphor for today’s big pharma.

What Is Really Killing Pharma

Mon, 04/04/2011 - 08:00 — Anthony Nicholls

Sometimes it’s frustrating being in the business of servicing an industry so manifestly important and so manifestly stupid. I started OpenEye to help those I had come to know in pharma do a better job, enjoy their work more, and further the science of drug discovery. And I think we’ve done okay: shape has become a routine way of finding new or better molecules; 3D is no longer seen as difficult.

Recommendation System for Compound Selection

Mon, 02/28/2011 - 13:42 — Joe Corkery

Just recently, Swann et al. of Abbott Labs published "A Unified, Probabilistic Framework for Structure- and Ligand-Based Virtual Screening" in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. The paper is a very interesting extension of previous work done by Muchmore et al., also of Abbott Labs.

The Bayh-Dole Act

Mon, 02/14/2011 - 10:44 — Anthony Nicholls

In my last post, I ranted on about the problems surrounding contributions by academics to molecular modeling, and cited as a particular issue the Bayh-Dole Act (BD), which enabled and encouraged academic institutions to patent the intellectual property arising from government funded research.

Cloud Computing

Tue, 11/09/2010 - 15:27 — Joe Corkery

I am frequently being asked by our users whether OpenEye's licensing model allows them to run OpenEye software in the cloud. As this appears to be a common concern and a potential legal stumbling block for many groups, I want to make sure that our answer is unambiguous and clarified here.

The short answer to this question is YES!

The Rant Goes On…

Mon, 11/08/2010 - 13:16 — Anthony Nicholls

In August, I gave a talk at the Boston ACS meeting about the contribution of academics to molecular modeling. Okay, their lack of contribution to molecular modeling. I might even have had a slide that read, “If all academic research into modeling disappeared tomorrow, it would make no difference… to the drug discovery industry. Discuss.”

Ant's Rant - The First of Many

Thu, 08/19/2010 - 08:34 — Anthony Nicholls

There’s been a lot of hot air blowing around lately about Bill Gates’s decision to invest $10M in our friends at Schrodinger. Some have even suggested that this might mean a return to the heady days of the ’80s when the belief that computation was about to make drug design “rational” was in the air.

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