Last modified: Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Informatics professor receives $120,000 grant from Eli Lilly & Co.
Professor David Wild researching ways to data mine public chemical and biological information
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 8, 2008
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Eli Lilly and Co. has awarded a one-year, $120,000 grant to David Wild, assistant professor in the Indiana University School of Informatics, to research ways to data mine the ever-increasing amount of publicly available information about chemical compounds and their biological activities.
Wild, also associate director of the Chemical Informatics Program for the School of Informatics, is developing a software tool that will aggregate data from a multitude of online databases and computation tools using a Web service infrastructure previously developed through funding from the National Institutes of Health. The tool will be a "one-stop-shop" for understanding the properties and behavior of chemical compounds, in particular existing and potential drug molecules.
"The creation of this software is significant because it will enable a comprehensive picture of a potential drug's behavior to be assessed, not just using static information from databases, but also using active on-the-fly predictions and calculations from state-of-the-art tools," Wild said. "Drug researchers will have a single tool that can give them needed information from the public arena, and we hope it will help to speed up the drug discovery pipeline."
Founded in 2000 as the first school of its kind in the United States, the Indiana University School of Informatics is dedicated to research and teaching across a broad range of computing and information technology, with emphases on science, applications and societal implications. The school includes the departments of Computer Science and Informatics on the Bloomington campus and the Department of Informatics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
The school administers a variety of bachelor's and master's degree programs in computer science and informatics, as well as doctoral programs in computer science and the first-ever doctorate in informatics. The school is dedicated to excellence in education and research, to partnerships that bolster economic development and entrepreneurship, and to increasing opportunities for women and underrepresented minorities in computing and technology. For more information, visit www.informatics.indiana.edu.
For more information on the Lilly grant, contact Lisa Herrmann at 812-855-4125 or ljherrma@indiana.edu.
