Today, on the 26th of August, the I summer school-conference on chemoinformatics started working in A. M. Butlerov Institute of Chemistry of KFU. The following organisations have become the event organisers: Kazan Federal University, Russian Fundamental Research Fund, Russian Section of the International Chemoinformatics and QSAR Society, Russian Chemical Society named after D. I. Mendeleev.

Chemoinformatics is a new and extremely high-demand multidisciplinary field of modern chemical science located at the intersection of chemistry, biology, mathematics and informatics. The main objectives of this discipline are organising of storage of and access to chemical information, as well as its application for creation of compounds, reactions and materials possessing set characteristics.

The main field of chemoinformatics application is creation of new medical preparations, as well as creation of innovation materials, catalysts, reagents for chemical industry.

In Russia chemoinformatics is still in the making. Only recently Moscow State University (MGU) and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI) have opened the respective training courses, and in 2012 a Master’s Degree program in Chemoinformatics was launched in Kazan University and became the third acting educational program in this speciality.

The summer school-conference in chemoinformatics is an international event, which sets the following tasks: creation of conditions for world-class specialist training in chemoinformatics in Russia, as well as forming of an educational and research environment uniting representatives of academic science, pharmaceutical and chemical industries, IT-specialists and developers.

Famous scientists from France, Germany, Russia, USA, Austria participate in the conference. Participants were welcomed by the Vice-Rector of KFU for Research, Mr. Danis Nurgaliev, professor of the University of Strasbourg, Mr. Alexander Varnek, professor Vladimir Poroykov (Scientific Research Institute of Biomedical Chemistry named after V. N. Orekhovich of the Russian Academy of Science, Moscow), Director of A. M. Butlerov Institute of Chemistry, Mr. Vladimir Galkin, Head of the Department of Organic Chemistry, Mr. Igor Antipin, and the senior lecturer of the Department of Organic Chemistry of the Institute of Chemistry of KFU, Mr. Timur Madzhidov.

The conference will be held till the 29th of August. There are lectures and practical trainings included in its program.

Lectures cover various aspects of chemoinformatics: molecular representation, structural database retrieval organising, conformational searching, modeling of relation between chemical substance structure and properties, validation and usage of “structure – property” models, computer design of medical preparations (virtual screening; docking and pharmacophoral search application; prediction of ADME properties and toxicity, molecule chemogenomics).

Practical trainings include classes devoted to chemical database creation and management, modeling of relation between structure and properties, docking and pharmacophoral search application for medical preparation design.