Issue 6, 2016

The creation and characterisation of a National Compound Collection: the Royal Society of Chemistry pilot

Abstract

We present a summary of the National Compound Collection (NCC) pilot; which harvested chemical structure data from 746 publicly-available PhD theses to create an enhanced database of diverse and interesting (largely organic) molecular entities. The database comprised ∼75 000 structure entries, of which 70% were new to ChemSpider at the time of upload. The dataset was evaluated for structural uniqueness by twelve external drug discovery groups from the pharmaceutical, biotech, academic and not-for-profit sectors. These partners generated data reported here comparing the NCC pilot with their in-house compound collections. The proportion of NCC structures considered to be useful for drug discovery ranged from 5–80% depending on the strictness of the filters used; most interestingly from a drug discovery standpoint ∼13k NCC compounds (18% of the NCC) passed the filters and were of good diversity. These compounds are quite different from those that are already present in the screening collections but not so different that they are no longer considered to be drug-like. In general, the drug discovery teams would consider these compounds to be high value molecules for inclusion in their screening collections. This pilot addressed the potential value of unpublished data and explored the practicalities of large-scale data extraction, to inform both retrospective and prospective extraction of chemical data from theses.

Graphical abstract: The creation and characterisation of a National Compound Collection: the Royal Society of Chemistry pilot

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
19 Jan 2016
Accepted
22 Feb 2016
First published
23 Feb 2016
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY license

Chem. Sci., 2016,7, 3869-3878

Author version available

The creation and characterisation of a National Compound Collection: the Royal Society of Chemistry pilot

D. M. Andrews, L. M. Broad, P. J. Edwards, D. N. A. Fox, T. Gallagher, S. L. Garland, R. Kidd and J. B. Sweeney, Chem. Sci., 2016, 7, 3869 DOI: 10.1039/C6SC00264A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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