BioFocus DPI launches Kinase <i>SAR</i>fari knowledge base

BioFocus DPI, a Galapagos company, is launching its latest knowledge base, Kinase SARfari at this week’s World Pharmaceutical Congress. This fully integrated data repository and research workbench focuses on the protein kinase family of drug targets. This powerful tool combines chemical and biological data from internal proprietary and public sources in a single, dynamic system.

Protein kinases are an important class of drug targets often pursued by the pharmaceutical industry because of the vital role they play in regulating cancer and inflammatory diseases. Kinase SARfari enables the user to design compounds and focused libraries against specific protein kinases and rapidly optimize compound discovery through exploration of structure-activity relationships. Through effective integration and mapping of data from diverse biological and chemical sources, Kinase SARfari increases productivity and enhances knowledge discovery. The system comes pre-populated with:

• All human protein kinase sequences and a large collection of model organism orthologs
• Protein kinase clinical candidates and FDA approved drugs
• More than 700 3-D structural domains from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) with complete binding-site focused structural superposition
• Over 14,000 protein kinase compounds and more than 57,000 structure-activity relationship (SAR) screening and ADMET data points from BioFocus DPI’s StARLITe database
• Five binding site definitions based on analysis of known ligand-binding footprints with pre-calculated binding site physicochemical distances

Dr. John Overington, Senior Director of Discovery Informatics at BioFocus DPI, said “The main advantage of Kinase SARfari, is the ability to integrate biological and chemical data from public and proprietary sources. The result is a powerful, single-sweep, data mining resource that provides unique insight on kinase drug discovery.”

Dr. Overington will be presenting this new kinase drug discovery tool at this week’s World Pharmaceutical Congress in Philadelphia (USA). In the talk entitled, “Aligning Target Selection with Compound Design - Leveraging Prior Knowledge for Efficient Discovery”, he will discuss the value of integrating knowledge resources to facilitate effective drug discovery. At the same conference, BioFocus DPI’s Senior Director of Target Discovery, Dr. Richard Janssen, will deliver the presentation “High Content RNAi Screen for Huntington Disease”, where he will address the use of high content screens to identify genes that modulate the survival of cells over-expressing mutant forms of the Huntington protein.