The
Information School’s Chemoinformatics Research Group has released a paper which
will help the European Medicines Agency to decide whether new orphan drugs
should be granted licences.
Evaluation
and supervision of medicines throughout the European Union is the
responsibility of the European Medicines Agency. One particular activity which the Agency is
involved in is the licensing of orphan drugs – medicines which are designed to
treat people with rare diseases.
This
activity is currently carried out by a panel of human experts. However the Chemoinformatics Research Group’s
paper outlines computer techniques that could be used to help the panel in
deciding whether or not a new orphan drug should be granted a licence.
The paper
(Franco, P., Porta, N., Holliday, J. D. & Willett, P. “The use of 2D
fingerprint methods to support the assessment of structural similarity in
orphan drug legislation” Journal of
Cheminformatics, 6:5, 2014) can be found on the Journal of Cheminformatics website.
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