Chemogenomics. The growing number of available genome sequences of pathogens provides, for the first time, the opportunity to rationally prioritize all potential drug targets for a wide range of emerging and neglected infectious diseases. Despite the fact that our knowledge of observed attributes of the vast majority of pathogen proteins is limited or missing, our research is aimed at developing methods to prioritize potential drug targets from a pathogen genome a priori by inference from the collective wealth of bio-pharmacology knowledge available, such as genome sequences, model organism knock-outs, protein structures, medicinal chemistry structure-activity data, phylogenetic relationships and literature abstracts.
RAPID. We have applied our approach to create systems that enable the identification and prioritization of drug targets from the pathogenic, Gram-negative bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Aeropath Target Database) and the genomes of the causative agents of several important tropical diseases including African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis (Kinetoplastid Target Database). Our mission is to develop chemogenomics systems that enable the rapid analysis of pharmacology for any genome.
Rapid Analysis of Pharmacology for Infectious Diseases. Andrew L Hopkins, G Richard Bickerton, Ian M Carruthers, Stephen K Boyer, Harvey Rubin, John P Overington Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry (2011) 11 (10), 1292-1300(9)