Job: Computational Chemist at Oxford Drug Design

Oxford Drug Design is a unique biotechnology company. Supported by a proprietary set of computational chemistry methods developed in-house over the past 15 years, we are discovering new antibiotics to address the urgent threat of multi-drug resistant infections. Following success in obtaining funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s Innovation agency, we are expanding our computer-aided drug design (CADD) team.

Your Role:

  • Develop and validate novel CADD methodology in the areas of machine learning, statistical methods, chemogenomics and computational chemistry, working in a multidisciplinary team of internal and external colleagues, and be a key contributor to their success.
  • Use a diverse array of computational technology to devise hypotheses for structure-activity relationships and compounds to test these hypotheses, focused on our antibiotic drug discovery portfolio.
  • Maintain and build our internal cheminformatics databases and search technologies.
  • Maintain awareness of the latest technologies and developments in CADD and project areas.
  • Maintain an internal and external scientific presence by authoring significant scientific presentations and publications. 

Who you are:

You will hold a PhD (or equivalent experience) in computer science, machine learning, computational chemistry, or a related field. Industry experience would be an advantage. You are expected to have a high degree of independence and self-motivation. Ideally, your background would include some of the following:

  • Expertise in machine learning and other statistical approaches to data analysis and model generation.
  • Expertise in scientific computing, and good programming skills (Python, C++ and Java skills are particularly relevant).
  • Expertise in using cheminformatics techniques and relational databases.
  • Knowledge of computational chemistry and medicinal chemistry concepts is an advantage.
  • Very good written and verbal communication skills.

Please note that candidates must be eligible and able to work in the UK. Please include details of your eligibility with your application.

To apply, please send a CV and covering letter by 23 April-2019, quoting reference CC19-1, to: [email protected]

Oxford Drug Design Ltd., Oxford Centre for Innovation, New Road, Oxford, OX1 1BY, UK Telephone: +44 (0)1865 261469

CCK-14 Hackathon-2: 13 December 2018

TL;DR: CCK-14 Hackathon-2:  Thursday, December 13th, 2018, from 10 am – 5 pm in the Computer Suite, Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QU, will be followed by a wrap up in Biochemistry’s Seminar Room 5-6 pm. Bring your own ideas and programming problems, and join experts from the Cambridge Structural Database to learn about their Python API. Pizza provided. Hackathon tickets are limited, so please book by December 11th, 2018. Hackathon tickets are limited, so please book by December 11th, 2018.

 

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Please join us for our next “Comp Chem Kitchen” CCK Hackathon, 10 am – 5 pm on Thursday, December 13th, 2018, in the Computer Suite, Department of Biochemistry, South Parks Road, Oxford. Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre will be present to help out on projects using the the CSD Python API.

Registration now open: places are limited; please register before December 11th, 2018.

The hackathon will follow this format:

In advance: assembly of ideas and teams via website. On the day:

  • 10.00 am: Introduction. 
    • Assemble 4-8 teams with some expertise in each.
  • 10.30 am – 12.30 pm: Hacking – design and tools
  • 12.30 – 1.00 pm: Five min updates / requests for input and help
  • 1.00 – 2.00 pm: Lunch
  • 2.00 – 5.00 pm: Hacking
  • 5.00 – 6.00 pm: Lightning summaries of hacked projects.

Pizza and refreshments will be provided.

 

We would like to thank the University of Oxford MPLS Network and Interdisciplinary Fund for making CCK possible.

About CCK

Comp Chem Kitchen is a regular forum and seminar series to hear about and discuss computational methods for tackling problems in chemistry, biochemistry and drug discovery. It focuses principally on cheminformatics, computational chemistry, and molecular modelling, and overlaps with neighboring areas such as materials properties and bioinformatics.

We’re keen to encourage people involved in coding and methods development (i.e. hackers, in the original untarnished sense of the word) to join us. Our hope is that we will share best practices, even code snippets and software tools, and avoid re-inventing wheels.

In addition to local researchers, we invite speakers from industry and non-profits from time to time, and occasionally organize software demos and tutorials.

If you’re interested in giving a talk, here are some possible topics:

  • Software development (e.g.: Python, C, C++, CUDA, shell, Matlab);
  • Optimizing force field parameters & EVB models;
  • Cheminformatics (e.g.: RDKit);
  • X-ray and NMR crystallography, including small molecule and macromolecular;
  • Protein & RNA modeling, including Molecular Dynamics;
  • Virtual screening and Docking;
  • Machine Learning;
  • Quantum Methods, including DFT.

Bring your laptops, by the way, if you have something you’d like to show!

Please pass this message on to friends, colleagues, and students who may be interested too!

The main CCK web site is: http://compchemkitchen.org/
Follow us on Twitter: @CompChemKitchen
See you soon! We’re looking forward to seeing and hearing about the diverse range of computational molecular science that you’re cooking up…

—Garrett, Richard, Phil

[email protected]
[email protected]
philip.biggin@bioch.ox.ac.uk

Announcement: Course on Machine Learning for Chemoinformatics

Dr Martyn Winn would like to announce the following course:

Machine Learning for Chemoinformatics
Location: RAL, Harwell Campus
Dates: 6th – 10th August 2018
Registration fee:  academic £150, commercial £1000

The course covers all of the major methods in machine learning for classification and regression, with examples taken from problems in chemoinformatics. It has been designed for data analysts working in the pharmaceutical industry, but would also be useful to chemists interested in advanced data analysis. The course includes practical examples using commonly available Python packages.

For further information and to register, go to:

Cheers
Martyn

Dr. Martyn Winn
STFC Daresbury Laboratory, Daresbury, Warrington, WA4 4AD, U.K.
Tel: +44 1925 603455 (DL)   or   +44 1235 567865 (RcaH)
E-mail: [email protected]       Skype: martyn.winn

CCK-7

TL;DR: CCK-7, the 7th of our new series of meetings for computational chemists, cheminformaticians, and molecular modelers, is on Thursday, March 16th, 2017, at 5 pm in the Abbot’s Kitchen, Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QR. Free tickets are available.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Please join us for our next “Comp Chem Kitchen”, CCK-7, at 5-6 pm on Thursday, March 16th, 2017, in the Abbot’s Kitchen, Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, South Parks Road, Oxford. We are really pleased to announce Prof. Val Gillet, Professor of Cheminformatics at the Information School, University of Sheffield UK, will be speaking:

  • Prof. Val Gillet (Information School, University of Sheffield): “From spectral clustering to spectral geometry: applications in chemoinformatics“. The talk will focus on two distinct but related projects. The first describes the development of spectral clustering for large datasets of up to 100K compounds. One of the main advantages of spectral clustering over more conventional methods is that it permits overlapping clusters, whereby a molecule may belong to more than one cluster. It is also straight-forward to implement clustering with an asymmetric similarity index such as the Tversky index which offers some advantages for the clustering of molecular fragments. We also describe the development of a method for alignment-independent molecular shape comparison based on spectral geometry techniques and present preliminary results for this approach.

Lightning Talks:

  • Max Pillong (Novartis, Basel) “HSM: A novel peptide descriptor and its application to in silico peptide design
  • Dr Anthony Bradley (Project Leader – OxXChem at University of Oxford): “Hands-on: introduction to Git“.
  • Susan Leung (OPIG, University of Oxford): “Hands-on: Using Pandas with RDKit“.

Get in touch if you would like to give a 5 minute talk at a future CCK on your latest research or give a quick demo your latest programming project, or even to nominate someone (students, postdocs, professionals, PIs, Emeritus Professors). The talks usually resemble one of the following styles:

  • an overview of computational chemistry in your research;
  • a (live!) demonstration of some software that you are developing or using; or
  • a summary of a computational chemistry paper, method, programming language, or tool that you’ve seen recently.

Refreshments will be provided, including beer.

We would like to thank the University of Oxford MPLS Network and Interdisciplinary Fund for making CCK possible.

About CCK

Comp Chem Kitchen is a regular forum and seminar series to hear about and discuss computational methods for tackling problems in chemistry, biochemistry and drug discovery. It focuses principally on cheminformatics, computational chemistry, and molecular modelling, and overlaps with neighboring areas such as materials properties and bioinformatics.

We’re keen to encourage people involved in coding and methods development (i.e. hackers, in the original untarnished sense of the word) to join us. Our hope is that we will share best practices, even code snippets and software tools, and avoid re-inventing wheels.

In addition to local researchers, we invite speakers from industry and non-profits from time to time, and occasionally organize software demos and tutorials.

If you’re interested in giving a talk, here are some possible topics:

  • Software development (e.g.: Python, C, C++, CUDA, shell, Matlab);
  • Optimizing force field parameters & EVB models;
  • Cheminformatics (e.g.: RDKit);
  • X-ray and NMR crystallography, including small molecule and macromolecular;
  • Protein & RNA modeling, including Molecular Dynamics;
  • Virtual screening and Docking;
  • Machine Learning;
  • Quantum Methods, including DFT.

Bring your laptops, by the way, if you have something you’d like to show!

 

Want to speak? Ideas for speakers?

* If you have ideas for speakers, or would like to give a talk, let us know. We also invite lightning talks of 5 minutes (or fewer) from attendees, so if you have some cool code you’ve been working on and would like to demo, bring your laptop, smartphone, tablet, (wearable?) and tell us all about it. *

Please pass this message on to friends, colleagues, and students who may be interested too!

The main CCK web site is: http://compchemkitchen.org/
Follow us on Twitter: @CompChemKitchen
See you soon! We’re looking forward to seeing and hearing about the diverse range of computational molecular science that you’re cooking up…

—Garrett, Richard, Phil and Rob

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

CCK-5 [including RDKit workshop]

evotecukCCK-5, on Tuesday, November 1st, 2016, will be another “two-parter” comprised of CCK-5.1 and CCK-5.2. We would like to thank Evotec(UK) Ltd. for supporting this event.

For our fifth meeting, CCK-5.1, on Tuesday, November 1st, 2016, we are honoured to be hosting Greg Landrum; he is the leading developer of the open source cheminformatics toolkit, RDKit.

RDKit is an open source C++ toolkit for cheminformatics with Python, Java and C# wrappers and a number of KNIME cheminformatics nodes. A full overview of its functionality is provided in the documentation.


CCK-5.1

2:00-4:00 pm
Abbot’s Kitchen, Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QR:

  • Dr Greg Landrum (VP Life Sciences, KNIME.com; and Managing Director,T5 Informatics GmbH) will run a hands-on workshop and hackathon on RDKit. Please bring your laptop (Windows, Mac or Linux): and don’t worry if you do not have RDKit installed. We will help you get set up.

A total of 35 places are available, please register early to avoid disappointment. Registration  for CCK-5.1.


CCK-5.2

5.00 – 6:00 pm
Talks and refreshments/beer, will again be held in the Abbot’s Kitchen in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QR:

Register for CCK-5.2.

CCK-3

Our third  meeting, CCK-3, on Tuesday, July 12th, 2016, will be a little different: it will be a two-parter, CCK-3.1 and CCK-3.2:

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) has been hosting and distributing the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) for 50 years, and its latest release, CSD 2016, is the “world’s essential database of crystal structures, [with] over 800,000 entries”.


CCK-3.1

1:30-3:30 pm
IT Teaching Laboratory (LG.02) of the Department of Statistics, 24-29 St Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3LB:

Andrew Maloney & Peter Wood (CCDC): CSD Python API Workshop and Hackathon. (We are planning to provide hands-on access to the API, and since  there are only 48 desktops, so you should make sure to book a ticket.)

Register for CCK-3.1.


CCK-3.2

5.00 – 6:00 pm
Talks and refreshments/beer, will again be held in the Abbot’s Kitchen in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QR:

Register for CCK-3.2.

If you have a 5-minute Lightning Talk you’d like to give, get in touch!

Also, if you have some code you’d like demo, bring your laptop/mobile device.
Refreshments will be provided, including beer. (Thank you to Prof. Phil Biggin and the MRC Proximity to Discovery Fund for supporting CCK.)

CCK-2 (Tuesday 14th June)

Our second meeting, CCK-2 will be held in the Abbott’s Kitchen in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QR at 5 pm on Tuesday June 14th 2016 (8th Week). Free tickets are available.

Speakers

  • Mike Bodkin (Vice President, Research Informatics, Evotec), “Chemical space and how to warp drive discovery”.
  • Jonathan Yates (Department of Materials, University of Oxford), Lightning talk,  “A brief introduction to the Collaborative Computational Project for NMR Crystallography (CCP-NC)”.
  • Jonny Brooks-Bartlett (Elspeth Garman Group, Department of Biochemistry); Lightning talk: “The Julia Programming Language”.
  • Fernanda Duarte (Rob Paton Group, Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford): Lightning talk: “Exploring biochemical systems using the Empirical Valence Bond (EVB) approach”.
  • Matteo Degiacomi (Justin Benesch Group, Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford): Lightning talk: “The Python package BiobOx: a collection of data structures, tools and methods for biomolecular modelling” BiobOx is used for manipulation, measurement, analysis and assembly of atomistic and super coarse-grain structures as well as EM maps.

Talks will take place between 5pm and 6pm, please stay for refreshments and chat afterwards.

We would like to thank Prof. Philip Biggin and the MRC Proximity to Discovery Fund for supporting CCK.

CSD Python API example

Number of non-H atoms in molecules reported in the Cambridge Structural Database

An unexplained phenomenon in the CSD collection of molecular crystal structures is shown below.

The code below is included in Jerome Wicker’s talk from CCK-1 as a simple example of how to iterate through and extract information from the CSD using the Python API. The phenomenon has been noted many times by CCDC researchers.

The CSD Python API is used to retreive each crystal structure entry from the database using the EntryReader() iterator. The number of heavy atoms (non-hydrogen atoms) in the heaviest molecular component of organic crystal structure is appended to a list heavy_atoms.

Finally a histogram of these heavy atom counts shows that molecules with even numbers of heavy atoms are observed more frequently than those with odd numbers in the same range.

In [6]:
%pylab inline
Populating the interactive namespace from numpy and matplotlib

This page is a copy of an interactive Python 2 notebook exported from Jupyter. In Jupyter, the %pylab inline command above loads numerical and plotting libraries and ensures that plots appear in the notebook instead of in a separate window. It isn’t required if running python from the command line, and the required libraries (numpy and matplotlib) are reimported below for convenience.

In [7]:
from ccdc.io import EntryReader
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

csd_reader = EntryReader('CSD')
heavy_atoms = []

for entry in csd_reader:
    if entry.is_organic:
        try:
            mol = entry.molecule.heaviest_component
        except:
            continue
        heavy_atoms.append(len(mol.heavy_atoms))
        
plt.figure()
plt.hist(heavy_atoms,bins=np.max(heavy_atoms))
plt.xlabel('Number of heavy atoms',fontsize=20)
plt.ylabel('Hits in CSD', fontsize=20)
plt.show()

Limiting the x-axis range:

In [11]:
plt.figure()
plt.hist(heavy_atoms,bins=np.max(heavy_atoms))
plt.xlabel('Number of heavy atoms',fontsize=20)
plt.ylabel('Hits in CSD', fontsize=20)
plt.xlim([10,60])
plt.show()
In [ ]:

First meeting

CCK-1 (Tuesday 24th May)

In the spirit of the name, our inaugural meeting, CCK-1 will be held in the Abbott’s Kitchen in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at 5pm on Tuesday May 24th 2016 (5th Week).

Refreshments will be provided.

Jerome Wicker from Chemistry will be speaking about “Machine learning for classification of solid form data extracted from CSD and ZINC”. The software tools discussed include RDKit, CSD, and scikit-learn.

There will also be 2 lightning talks, each ~5 minutes long. Hannah Patel from the Department of Statistics will speak on “Novelty Score: Prioritising compounds that potentially form novel protein-ligand interactions and novel scaffolds using an interaction centric approach”. Software covered will include Django and RDKit. Dr Michael Charlton from InhibOx will also speak on his latest research.