Subject: Re: FW: Drug-like inactive molecules

From: Roger Lahana <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 1999 12:18:48 +0200

Arthur,

"Arthur M. Doweyko" wrote:

> No company in their right mind would release any structural information in their
> database. Your idea seems reasonable, but only without thinking of the
> ramifications.

Thank you for your contribution to this debate.
As you maybe noticed, I am also working in a company, so I certainly know what you
mean.
And as you certainly noticed as well, our intent again is to make all these data
publicly available.
Should my request be targeted at pharmaceutical companies, I would certainly not use
public discussion lists and I would certainly not announce that we would make the
collected data publicly available.

Clearly, this initiative is mainly addressed to academic scientists, as it should
appear after thinking of the ramifications.

Regards,

Roger

---

From: Roger Lahana <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 1999 09:44:44 +0200

Dear Han,

[email-masked] wrote:

> What is not a hit today may be one tomorrow!

Thank you for this sensible comment, which gives me the opportunity to clarify
this point: what is not a hit today *on a given target* may be one tomorrow
*on another one*! Therefore, we would record this molecule in our database as
a non-hit for the target(s) where it has been shown it is not a hit. The fact
that it could become a hit on something different would not be in the scope of
the database. To some extent, if it is indeed active on some other targets,
then it should be in the WDI or other similar databases.

The idea really is to be able to get for any given target a list of measured
non-hits. It is not to say that molecules in such a database are inactive
against every present and future target. A good example of this is Cocaine,
which is indeed in the WDI for its well-known CNS activity, but which has been
measured as inactive on the histamine H1 receptor. Cocaine would then be
referenced as "inactive on H1".

Roger

****************************************************************
Dr Roger Lahana                                          Synt:em
Vice-President R&D                     Parc Scientifique G.Besse
Computational Drug Discovery                         30000 Nimes
email: [email-masked]                            France
Tel: +33 (0)466 048 666                  Fax: +33 (0)466 048 667
****************************************************************
                   http://www.syntem.com
****************************************************************