GVK Biosciences, the discovery research and development organisation based in Hyderabad, India, has licensed its GOSTAR online structure-activity relationship (SAR) database to the Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

The SAR is the relationship between the molecular structure of a molecule and its biological activity. Analysing SAR enables researchers to identify the chemical groups responsible for a target biological effect in an organism.

Developed over 10 years by a team of more than 200 curators, GVK BIO’s GOSTAR (GVK BIO Online Structure Activity Relationship) Database includes over six million compounds, manually curated through screening of more than million patents and 400,000 journals, as well over 18 million quantitative SAR points.

The company’s informatics division is known for its manually curated databases in the fields of structure-activity relationships, biomarkers and clinical outcomes. The division also provides customised data-curation services in multiple areas.

GOSTAR is the result of integrating more than 15 individual databases, which include the complete chemical space for 10 leading biological targets, all published and patented inhibitors against biological targets (over 6,500 in total), and data on toxicity and natural products.

A number of analysis tools have been built into the composite database, enabling users to query, browse, retrieve and export data in various formats.

The Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee was set up in 2006 within the College of Life Sciences, to conduct translational research with a particular focus on neglected tropical diseases and innovative targets/pathways.