Date: May 4th 2012

Dear Colleagues,

The Computers in Chemistry Division of the ACS is excited to announce the Teach-Discover-Treat ("TDT") initiative. TDT is a call to action for our computational community which seeks to address major gaps in drug discovery education while developing targeted efforts against neglected diseases.

As part of TDT, we are kicking off a competition that solicits submissions of tutorials for state-of-the-art drug discovery workflows with the requirement that all computational tools and models used in the workflows are freely available. Our hope is that requiring workflows to use open source / open access platforms will enable collaboration and innovation across boundaries. We encourage you to reach out to colleagues in the larger scientific community and use this initiative as a platform to advance our field and innovate:
https://sites.google.com/a/teach-discover-treat.org/web2012/get-involved

Three competition categories are focused on neglected diseases. Experimental follow-up in all three categories is being made possible through partnerships for compound acquisition, synthesis and biochemical testing. This is where you can have a real impact on drug discovery for neglected diseases!

A fourth "open innovation" category seeks innovative drug discovery workflows that do not fall into one of the other three categories and are either exemplified on a neglected disease project or adaptable to a neglected disease application.

Please visit our website, www.teach-discover-treat.org, for more information, including additional competition details and presentation slides from the kick-off symposium at the ACS Spring 2012 National Meeting in San Diego. For those of you who may have missed the symposium, on May 8th the recorded presentations will be made available through ACS at http://edmc.acs.org/Common/presentation.aspx/Spring2012/COMP/COMPnegDis01 .

The datasets for the various challenges are now available for download:
https://sites.google.com/a/teach-discover-treat.org/web2012/downloads
The readme files that are included for each of the four challenges contain specific instructions; please read them carefully.

We invite and encourage each of you to join us in this effort. Good luck!

The TDT Steering Committee
Hanneke Jansen, Rommie Amaro, Jane Tseng and Wendy Cornell