2 research outputs found
FOCUS î—¸ Development of a Global Communication and Modeling Platform for Applied and Computational Medicinal Chemists
Communication of data and ideas within
a medicinal chemistry project
on a global as well as local level is a crucial aspect in the drug
design cycle. Over a time frame of eight years, we built and optimized
FOCUS, a platform to produce, visualize, and share information on
various aspects of a drug discovery project such as cheminformatics,
data analysis, structural information, and design. FOCUS is tightly
integrated with internal services that involveî—¸among othersî—¸data
retrieval systems and <i>in-silico</i> models and provides
easy access to automated modeling procedures such as pharmacophore
searches, R-group analysis, and similarity searches. In addition,
an interactive 3D editor was developed to assist users in the generation
and docking of close analogues of a known lead. In this paper, we
will specifically concentrate on issues we faced during development,
deployment, and maintenance of the software and how we continually
adapted the software in order to improve usability. We will provide
usage examples to highlight the functionality as well as limitations
of FOCUS at the various stages of the development process. We aim
to make the discussion as independent of the software platform as
possible, so that our experiences can be of more general value to
the drug discovery community