Short-Course in Practical Structure-based Ligand Design - Summer 2009

The Department of Medicinal Chemistry, College of Pharmacy will offer an informational Short-Course in Practical Structure-based Ligand Design during the Summer 2009 term.

The short-course will be comprised of six 90-minute lectures covering the core principles of:

• ligand binding
• conceptual approaches to design
• experimental methods for structure determination
• strategies for utilizing structural data in ligand optimization

Most of the lectures will be presented by Dr. Barry Finzel, a new member of the college faculty and a crystallographer who spent 20 years in new drug discovery research at The Upjohn Company, Pharmacia and Pfizer.  

While many courses in structure-based design focus on the technical details of computational methods, this series will take a broader strategic view of the state of the art.

Participants

The sequence is intended to benefit multidisciplinary drug discovery researchers at any rank (graduate student or post-doctoral professional) that hope to define strategic directions for drug discovery research now or in the future, but may not necessarily claim either computational methods or synthetic medicinal chemistry as their area of expertise.

Course Goals

Our aim is to provide participants with exposure to successful strategies, practical implementations and limitations of these methods that is currently not collected in any other single academic experience. 

How to Participate

The short-course is free and open to any interested participant, but we would like to gauge the level of interest for planning purposes. Please consult the proposed lecture schedule below and send an e-mail olson017@umn.edu with subject header “structure-based design course” to express your interest in participating.

Course Outline: Practical Structure-Based Ligand Design

August 4
B.C. Finzel
"Conceptual ligand design"

• Elements of Good and Bad interactions
• Examples of Conceptual Design in practice

August 6
B.C Finzel
"Experimental Methods for Co-structure determination"

• X-Ray; NMR (in brief)
• Shortcomings of Experimental Structural Biology

August 11
B.C. Finzel
"Empirical Lead Discovery"

• HTS; Fragment Screening
• Screening strategies

August 13
B.C. Finzel, E.A.Amin
"Computational Ligand Design"

• Computing free energy of binding
• Docking;Virtual screening

August 18
B.C. Finzel
"Example Case Studies"

• Selective inhibition of protein kinases
• Others (TBD)

August 20
B.C Finzel
"Emerging Topics"

• Data Mining
• SBDD Project Management