Our age has come

Alexandre Varnex of University of Strasbourg organized Japanese-French collaboration in chemoinformatics from 2007 to 2016 and a series of Autumn Schools in Chemoinformatics in Tokyo (2011, 2015), and Nara (2013, 2017, 2019) which brought together experienced and young scientists. This was initiated by Funatsu and has been a tremendous success worldwide. The 8th French-Japanese Workshop on Computational Methods in Chemistry (FJCMC2020) will be held on March 19-20, 2020 at Kumamoto in Japan organized by Alexandre Varnek, Kimito Funatsu, and Manabu Sugimoto (http://www.chem. kumamoto-u.ac.jp/~frjp2020/ program.html).

Data science can be created by integrating disciplines such as theoretical understanding in selected research fields, informatics (for data systematization, model construction, and prediction), and statistics, for validation. Specifically, chemistry and chemical physics could be overlapped with chemical information (molecular structures), and chemometrics validation. When we focused molecules, we can integrate bioinformatics and chemoinformatics because both research fields focus on understanding of life systems and ecosystems based on molecules, i.e. macromolecules such as DNA RNA, proteins and small molecules such as metabolites and drugs are targeted in bioinformatics and chemoinformatics. Advanced materials are essential to economic security and human well-being. We believe that data science provides us a good opportunity to ask ourselves about how molecular informatics should be advanced in a variety of scientific fields.

Now, recent development of chemoinformatics encourages us by saying “It is our time to shine ! Let’s make seminal works in the development of chemoinformatics !” We hope that a lot of talented researchers and students would learn from various kinds of achievements in chemoinformatics. Our age has just come!