ChemQuest's 10th birthday
1995 - 2005
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New Venture in Green Chemistry
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Going Green
"As ChemQuest enters its 10th year of business, we would like to thank all our collaborators, colleagues, and, most importantly, customers, for their support." This was the greeting we sent out at New Year when we were obviously still recovering from the year end festivities. Founded in January 1995, ChemQuest is indeed 10 years old, and therefore has entered its 11th trading year. A rather worrying mistake for a company specialising in data analysis, but blame the webmaster - her numeracy has always been rather questionable.
New post doc
One of ChemQuest's objectives is the development and spread of drug design techniques to other applications and industries: we are delighted to announce that ChemQuest has joined a new venture called Envision Chemistry. Offering support to industry on key areas of sustainable chemistry, Envision's aim is to help companies to apply "Green Chemistry" principles in order to improve the environmental profile of their products, portfolios and processes. Green Chemistry has been defined (P Anastas) as
"The invention, design, and application of chemical products and processes to reduce or to eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances"
Envision is a team of hitherto independent experts, from a range of relevant disciplines, who have come together to provide a comprehensive portfolio of services to help industry develop and use sustainable approaches. This integrated system of support means that the environmental impact of a potential product or process may be assessed from its inception, so that both costs to the environment and to industry are minimised. ChemQuest is particularly interested in the application of CAMD methods to the properties of chemicals in the initial research phase so that large R&D expenditure is not shown to have been wasted when the environmental audit starts. To learn more visit the Envision website.
a role in the development of MS. The researchers suggest that complex interactions between genes and the environment, before or shortly after birth, may explain the birth month link.
British Medical Journal, 2005, Vol 330, pages 120 123.
Strange but true -birth month and MS
The month of a person's birth affects their risk of developing MS, research has found. In the northern hemisphere, being born in May is
MS. Fewer people with MS were born in November and more were born in May, roughly 10% more. Data from 42,000 people with MS in Denmark and Sweden showed a similar pattern.
Genetic and environ-mental factors are both believed to play
linked to a higher risk and being born in November to a lower risk of developing MS.
Researchers studied data from 17,874 people with MS from Canada and 11,502 from Britain. They compared data from a similar group of people in the general population and from unaffected brothers and sisters of the people with
Dr Subhash Ajmani has taken up an ICI funded post-doctoral position at the Centre for Molecular Design at the University of Portsmouth.
The aim of the fellowship is to develop new methodology and software to support high throughput experimentation (HTE)
projects carried out at ICI sites.