So why did we call it SALT MINER?

We have announced today with AZ, Roche and Genentech the launch of a consortium to process data from all three companies using Matched Molecular Pair Analysis to extract the medicinal chemistry knowledge. The Grand Rule Database will be at the heart of MedChemica's business and we aim to help many people discovery new drugs for the clinic. We call it SALT MINER - now why did we call it that?

We do live in a world of brands and logos. If you listen to people talk they do like to label things to make them easier to talk about and refer to – just think of the nick names we give each other. So we felt compelled to call our Knowledge sharing consortium using Matched Molecular Pair Analysis something but KSCuMMP doesn't really work. We also work in a world of chem.-informatics and computation and there has been a long history of finding an amusing acronym for the new algorithm you have just written. Just have a good look at the latest edition of Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling.

I was sat in a café (don’t these stories all start like this), with a piece of paper having written out all the words for our complex process of statistical analysis, process, database and exploitation trying to get something to work. I stared blankly at the salt and pepper pots – well there we go. First versions were SALT and CHIPS, SALT and PEPPER, just SALT for while.  We as computational chemists mine data and process it – suddenly SALT MINE. This started to have a good feel because we are based in Cheshire UK. Here there are huge underground salt mines. As these are deep and dry they're now used for long term document storage – lots of information just sitting there….hmmm. Where we used to work "get it up from the salts mines" was the slang term for ordering a report from the archive.

We made it SALT MINER because the system is about exploitation of the knowledge and making better molecules that lead to drug candidates – a person will use the system: this worked.

We do use a lot of Statistical analysis, Large pharma is contributing datasets (SALT) and we will exploit it through Medchemica’s INtegrated design EngineeR. Real salt mining is a tough old business and although what we do is nothing like that level of manual work, the extraction of the nuggets of new knowledge from large datasets is a distinctly non-trivial exercise. Intellectual SALT Miners we are.