Collaborative Virtual Organization and Infrastructure for Anti-Malarial Drug Design

Roman Affentranger and Barry Hardy (Douglas Connect),
Alessandro Contini (University of Milan),
Hugo Gutierrez de Teran (Public Galician Foundation of Genomic Medicine),
Jeffrey Wiseman and Matt Clark (Pharmatrope),
Jeff Spitzner (Rescentris),
Ruben Papoian, William Seibel and Sandra Nelson (University of Cincinnati Drug Discovery Center),
Sharon Bryant (Inte:Ligand),
Andrew Wilks and Isabelle Lucet (Monash University), and
Christian Doerig (EPFL, Lausanne)

The Scientists Against Malaria consortium was formed from the InnovationWell Neglected Diseases Collaboration Pool as a virtual drug discovery organization to collaborate on the design of kinase inhibitors against the Plasmodium Malarial parasite. Work activities have included target selection and modelling, protein expression and assay development, computational drug design, and screening. Supported by developments on the EU FP7 funded SYNERGY and OpenTox projects, a combination of interoperable information systems, ontologies and web services have been designed and deployed to manage the data, documents, computational and assay results, activity and toxicology predictions, as well as dashboards to track project progress and to support decision making. We will describe our virtual organization approach and the ICT infrastructure built to support the scientific work, and we present initial results obtained.