Professor UNC School of Medicine, North Carolina, United States
Additional Fees Apply -- visit the Short Course Program section for more information.
With the advent of highthroughput, structure-assisted, and virtual screening an argument could be made that every target is now druggable. However, with an estimated 600-1500 possible druggable genes related to disease, the bottleneck now is judicious target choice; coupled with this is the choice of discovery strategy (target- vs system-based). This course discusses the pharmacological techniques available to relate targets to therapeutic opportunity, apply new ideas to re-visit mined out or apparently intractable targets, validation beyond targets (pathway-validation) and strategies to improve the disappointing 50% efficacy failure rate for new drug candidates.
Who Should Attend:
Biologists involved in drug discovery
Medicinal chemists
Students of pharmacology
Academic pharmacologists
How You Will Benefit From This Course:
Gain new insights into state of the art ideas on drug targets and their association with therapeutic opportunities
Learn new tools to quantitatively assess molecular effects on drug targets
Learn how parameters from these methods can predict activity in all systems
Define new vistas around old targets to better define chemical targets for receptors
Course Topics:
Systems vs Target based research
Validation- example of CCR5 HIV
Knock outs / Knock ins / DREADs
Drugging Orphans- current methods
Drugability vs Target choice
50% efficacy failures: reasons why / ways forward
Target vs Pathway Validation: biased signaling
Single vs Multiple target engagement (CNS multi-target drugs)
Target remits (criteria for new drugs)
Prosecuting the genome (single genes vs ‘nomic’ collections)
Drug ‘re-purposing’ / ‘mined-out’ or ‘intractable’ targets: other shots on goal
