Steinbeck group moves to European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in January 2008
I’m very delighted to announce my move to the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton near Cambridge, UK, at the beginning of 2008.
At EBI, I will re-establish my research group and become leader of the chemoinformatics-related service teams, including the ChEBI and Reactome teams.
Future Directions at EBI
All of my ongoing research projects (SENECA, Bioclipse, CDK) will be continued at EBI and constitute a solid base for the rapid formation of a strong research group.
In addition, there is a plethora of fascinating modeling and data-analysis projects to be envisioned in Systems Biology in addition to the final grand goal of achieving a whole-cell or even whole-organism metabolic simulation. At EBI we will pursue the implementation of a metabolic simulation environment, with the goal of creating novel approaches to drug discovery. The “one-target, one-drug” paradigm still followed in many pharmaceutical chemoinformatics studies presented at conferences has clearly not lead to an increased number of drugs on the market and it is most importantly not capable of preventing failures of novel compounds in late clinical trials. Only a systems biology approach to drug discovery, taking into account transport phenomena, the interaction with all or as many targets as possible may allow us to make correct predictions.
To alleviate the abysmal lack of chemical data in some crucial areas of Systems Biology, we are interested in text, or better, publication mining techniques. In an ongoing collaboration with the Center for Molecular Informatics at Cambridge University, we will aim at creating an automated workflow for the extraction of molecular structures and data from the printed literature – past and present.
The Steinbeck Group offers PhD student positions via the EBI’s PhD program in 2008. Applications need to be submitted by Dec. 17 2007.
As leader of the chemoinformatics-related service teams at EBI (ChEBI, Reactome, etc.), my emphasis will be to enhance the existing resources with complete chemical semantics and raise funding for a substantial growth of the resources while securing their quality. The chemistry-related databases at EBI have the chance to become a valuable resource in pharmaceutical and medicinal chemoinformatics and serve as an integration point between chemo- and bioinformatics.
Categorised as: Databases, Fun, Life of Chris, People, Teaching
Christoph…CONGRATULATIONS! I think is a great opportunity for you and for the institute. I look forward to retaining our relationship with you on the ChemSpider Advisory Group if that is acceptable to the institute. I’d like to chat with you sometime soon about the recent NMRShiftDB validation work and discussions on the blogs. Clearly you’re busy…let me know when is good.
Congrats – I’m very happy to hear this.
Great news Christoph ! This is indeed a fantastic opportunity and I wish you a lot of success with continuing your open-ness, science and settling into another life science area.
Mazel tov! And catch up when you can.