Christoph Steinbeck moves to European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)

I’d known about this for a few days and am delighted it’s now public:

I’m very delighted to announce my move to the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton near Cambridge, UK, at the beginning of 2008.

At EBI, I will re-establish my research group and become leader of the chemoinformatics-related service teams, including the ChEBI and Reactome teams.

Future Directions at EBI

All of my ongoing research projects (SENECA, Bioclipse, CDK) will be continued at EBI and constitute a solid base for the rapid formation of a strong research group.

In addition, there is a plethora of fascinating modeling and data-analysis projects to be envisioned in Systems Biology in addition to the final grand goal of achieving a whole-cell or even whole-organism metabolic simulation. At EBI we will pursue the implementation of a metabolic simulation environment, with the goal of creating novel approaches to drug discovery. The “one-target, one-drug” paradigm still followed in many pharmaceutical chemoinformatics studies presented at conferences has clearly not lead to an increased number of drugs on the market and it is most importantly not capable of preventing failures of novel compounds in late clinical trials. Only a systems biology approach to drug discovery, taking into account transport phenomena, the interaction with all or as many targets as possible may allow us to make correct predictions.

To alleviate the abysmal lack of chemical data in some crucial areas of Systems Biology, we are interested in text, or better, publication mining techniques. In an ongoing collaboration with the Center for Molecular Informatics at Cambridge University, we will aim at creating an automated workflow for the extraction of molecular structures and data from the printed literature – past and present.

The Steinbeck Group offers PhD student positions via the EBI’s PhD program in 2008. Applications need to be submitted by Dec. 17 2007.

As leader of the chemoinformatics-related service teams at EBI (ChEBI, Reactome, etc.), my emphasis will be to enhance the existing resources with complete chemical semantics and raise funding for a substantial growth of the resources while securing their quality. The chemistry-related databases at EBI have the chance to become a valuable resource in pharmaceutical and medicinal chemoinformatics and serve as an integration point between chemo- and bioinformatics.

PMR: I’ve know Christoph for several years. It was a typical “meeting” through Open Source chemistry development – a mixture of what is now the Blue Obelisk group of software. I have been particularly grateful to his wholehearted commitment to this and also to the development of CML.

This is yet another step in the liberation of chemical informatics. It emphasizes the value of the Open approach which is so rare in mainstream chemistry, but relatively common in bioscience, both for code and data. The major bioinformatics centres (NCBI/Pubchem, EBI/ChEBI, etc.) are tired of the lack of chemistry available for bioscientists and are determined to make it happen for themselves.

This is obviously a boost for the Blue Obelisk movement. I was visiting the EBI last week at a meeting on the  MACiE project on enzyme reactions.  This has been a great help in developing CMLReact – CML for chemical reactions – which we are now using in other projects.

It was short-sighted of  Germany to allow the CUBIC group to be closed, and there are now very few “chemoinformatics” groups in the world – certainly compared with bioinformatics which continues to expand rather than contract.

So this is a very welcome development both ad hominem and for the community. We shall obviously work closely together.