What is Cheminformatics?
The Web advertisement for Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Sixth Annual Cheminformatics conference describes the field thus: “the combination of chemical synthesis, biological screening, and data-mining approaches used to guide drug discovery and development” but this, again, sounds more like a field being identified by some of its most popular (and lucrative) activities, rather than by including all the diverse studies that come under its general heading. The story of one of the most successful drugs of all time, penicillin, seems bizarre, but the way we discover and develop drugs even now has similarities, being the result of chance, observation and a lot of slow, intensive chemistry. Until recently, drug design always seemed doomed to continue to be a labour-intensive, trial-and-error process. The possibility of using information technology, to plan intelligently and to automate processes related to the chemical synthesis of possible therapeutic compounds is very exciting for chemis
