TeachOpenCADD: a teaching platform for computer-aided drug design using open source packages and data

Abstract

Abstract Owing to the increase in freely available software and data for cheminformatics and structural bioinformatics, research for computer-aided drug design (CADD) is more and more built on modular, reproducible, and easy-to-share pipelines. While documentation for such tools is available, there are only a few freely accessible examples that teach the underlying concepts focused on CADD, especially addressing users new to the field. Here, we present TeachOpenCADD, a teaching platform developed by students for students, using open source compound and protein data as well as basic and CADD-related Python packages. We provide interactive Jupyter notebooks for central CADD topics, integrating theoretical background and practical code. TeachOpenCADD is freely available on GitHub: https://github.com/volkamerlab/TeachOpenCADD.

Keywords

• Computer-aided drug design
• Python
• RDKit
• Open source
• Teaching
• Learning