Wombat-Pharmacokinetics

Because the internal dissemination of this database within AstraZeneca R D (a company with 11 R D sites across four continents) was not deemed a success, AstraZeneca decided to discontinue the project as of May 2002. Backed by private funding, the database, renamed WOrld of Molecular BioAc-Tivity (WOMBAT) in 2003, continued to evolve [13] as discussed for WOMBAT 2006.1, below. Recognizing the paucity of chemical databases that capture clinical pharmacokinetics data in a searchable manner, we further developed the WOMBAT-PK (WOMBAT-Pharmacokinetics), to index such data from literature [14]. This chapter summarizes the contents of WOMBAT and WOMBAT-PK [15], some of the problems encountered in appropriately indexing biological activities and correct chemical structures (with focus on machine-readable contents for data mining), and provides some examples of data mining with WOMBAT. Other bioactivity databases [16], focused mostly on patent literature, are shown in Table 13.2-1 together with the on-line references. 

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