2010 New Drug Approvals - Pt. I - Tocilizumab (Actemra/RoActemra)

The first FDA approval of this year is Tocilizumab, approved on January 8th, under the trade name Actemra. Tocilizumab is a first-in-class interleukin-6 (IL-6) receptor-inhibiting monoclonal antibody drug, and is indicated for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis in adults who have had an inadequate response to one or more tumor necrosis factor (TNF) antagonist therapies. Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic and debilitating, systematic inflammatory disorder, which affects principally synovial tissues. Tocilizumab ATC code is L04AC07. Tocilizumab works by blocking the signalling of IL-6, an immune system soluble cytokine that is overproduced in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Other biological therapies for RA include tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) blockers (e.g, Golimumab), IL-1 blockers (e.g., Anakinra), monoclonal antibodies against B cells (e.g., Rituximab) and T cell costimulation inhibitors (e.g., Abatacept). However, all these act through binding to different target molecules. Others drugs with the same IL-6R binding mechanism as Tocilizumab are ALD518 and CNTO-136, which are currently reported to be in Phase II clinical trials. Tocilizumab is a recombinant humanized anti-human IL-6 receptor monoclonal antibody of the immunoglobulin IgG1κ subclass. Tocilizumab binds specifically to both soluble and membrane-bound IL-6 receptors (sIL-6R and mIL-6R) - mIL-6R is also known as CD126. Tocilizumab has a molecular weight of ca. 148 kDa, with a volume of distribution of ~6.4L, a linear clearance of ~12.5 mL/h and a half-life up to 13 days. The recommended starting dosage is ~4 mg/kg followed by an increase to ~8 mg/kg based on clinical response, administrated as a single intravenous drip infusion over 1 hour, every 4 weeks. Interestingly, Tocilizumab, via blocking cytokine signalling can affect expression levels of a wide variety of CYP450 drug metabolizing enzymes, leading to the potential for drug-drug interactions. The full prescribing information for Tocilizumab can be found here. Tocilizumab has a boxed warning (Risk of serious infections). Each light and heavy chain of Tocilizumab consists of 214 and 448 amino acids, respectively, and the four polypeptide chains are linked intra- and inter-molecularly by disulfide bonds. The license holder of Tocilizumab is Genentech, Inc. and the product website is www.actemra.com.

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ChEMBL 34 is out!

We are delighted to announce the release of ChEMBL 34, which includes a full update to drug and clinical candidate drug data. This version of the database, prepared on 28/03/2024 contains: 2,431,025 compounds (of which 2,409,270 have mol files) 3,106,257 compound records (non-unique compounds) 20,772,701 activities 1,644,390 assays 15,598 targets 89,892 documents Data can be downloaded from the ChEMBL FTP site: https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/ Please see ChEMBL_34 release notes for full details of all changes in this release: https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/chembl_34_release_notes.txt New Data Sources European Medicines Agency (src_id = 66): European Medicines Agency's data correspond to EMA drugs prior to 20 January 2023 (excluding vaccines). 71 out of the 882 newly added EMA drugs are only authorised by EMA, rather than from other regulatory bodies e.g.

New SureChEMBL announcement

(Generated with DALL-E 3 ∙ 30 October 2023 at 1:48 pm) We have some very exciting news to report: the new SureChEMBL is now available! Hooray! What is SureChEMBL, you may ask. Good question! In our portfolio of chemical biology services, alongside our established database of bioactivity data for drug-like molecules ChEMBL , our dictionary of annotated small molecule entities ChEBI , and our compound cross-referencing system UniChem , we also deliver a database of annotated patents! Almost 10 years ago , EMBL-EBI acquired the SureChem system of chemically annotated patents and made this freely accessible in the public domain as SureChEMBL. Since then, our team has continued to maintain and deliver SureChEMBL. However, this has become increasingly challenging due to the complexities of the underlying codebase. We were awarded a Wellcome Trust grant in 2021 to completely overhaul SureChEMBL, with a new UI, backend infrastructure, and new f

Accessing SureChEMBL data in bulk

It is the peak of the summer (at least in this hemisphere) and many of our readers/users will be on holiday, perhaps on an island enjoying the sea. Luckily, for the rest of us there is still the 'sea' of SureChEMBL data that awaits to be enjoyed and explored for hidden 'treasures' (let me know if I pushed this analogy too far). See here and here for a reminder of SureChEMBL is and what it does. This wealth of (big) data can be accessed via the SureChEMBL interface , where users can submit quite sophisticated and granular queries by combining: i) Lucene fields against full-text and bibliographic metadata and ii) advanced structure query features against the annotated compound corpus. Examples of such queries will be the topic of a future post. Once the search results are back, users can browse through and export the chemistry from the patent(s) of interest. In addition to this functionality, we've been receiving user requests for local (behind the

New Drug Approvals - Pt. XVII - Telavancin (Vibativ)

The latest new drug approval, on 11th September 2009 was Telavancin - which was approved for the treatment of adults with complicated skin and skin structure infections (cSSSI) caused by susceptible Gram-positive bacteria , including Staphylococcus aureus , both methicillin-resistant (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible (MSSA) strains. Telavancin is also active against Streptococcus pyogenes , Streptococcus agalactiae , Streptococcus anginosus group (includes S. anginosus, S. intermedius and S. constellatus ) and Enterococcus faecalis (vancomycin susceptible isolates only). Telavancin is a semisynthetic derivative of Vancomycin. Vancomycin itself is a natural product drug, isolated originally from soil samples in Borneo, and is produced by controlled fermentation of Amycolatopsis orientalis - a member of the Actinobacteria . Telavancin has a dual mechanism of action, firstly it inhibits bacterial cell wall synthesis by interfering with the polymerization and cross-linking of peptid

A python client for accessing ChEMBL web services

Motivation The CheMBL Web Services provide simple reliable programmatic access to the data stored in ChEMBL database. RESTful API approaches are quite easy to master in most languages but still require writing a few lines of code. Additionally, it can be a challenging task to write a nontrivial application using REST without any examples. These factors were the motivation for us to write a small client library for accessing web services from Python. Why Python? We choose this language because Python has become extremely popular (and still growing in use) in scientific applications; there are several Open Source chemical toolkits available in this language, and so the wealth of ChEMBL resources and functionality of those toolkits can be easily combined. Moreover, Python is a very web-friendly language and we wanted to show how easy complex resource acquisition can be expressed in Python. Reinventing the wheel? There are already some libraries providing access to ChEMBL d

The ChEMBL-og

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