Drug Discovery

This is a podcast and slides of a lecture given on Nov 23, 2011 in the course Phar201 (http://www.sdsc.edu/pb/edu/pharm201/) at the University of California San Diego by graduate student Roger Chang. It covers the interface between structural bioinformatics and systems biology form the viewpoint of off-target drug effects and large scale metabolic modeling.

This is a podcast and slides of a lecture given on Nov 02, 2011 in the course Phar201 (http://www.sdsc.edu/pb/edu/pharm201/) at the University of California San Diego by Prof. Phil Bourne. It covers some aspects of protein ligand interactions with emphasis on SMAP for determining similar ligand binding sites and the pharmacological implications.

This is a podcast and slides of a lecture given on Nov 9, 2011 in the course Phar201 (http://www.sdsc.edu/pb/edu/pharm201/) at the University of California San Diego by Prof. Michael Gilson. It covers structure and ligand based structure methods used in drug discovery.

A survey of the human genome was performed to understand the constituency of protein methyltransferases (both protein arginine and lysine methyltransferases) and the relatedness of their catalytic domains. We identified 51 protein lysine methyltransferase proteins based on similarity to the canonical Drosophila Su(var)3-9, enhancer of zeste (E(z)), and trithorax (trx) domain. Disruptor of telomeric silencing-1-like, a known protein lysine methyltransferase, did not fit within the protein...

Michael A. Kron, M.D., M.S., a professor of Medicine and the Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin, describes his research on drug discovery with filariasis and infectious disease.

Andrew Greene, Ph.D., describes the research foci of the Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, WI.

The notion of one-drug binding to one receptor to treat one disease is a dated concept. Using new bioinformatics and cheminfomatics techniques combined with systems biology we are at the beginning of an era when we can better predict the impact of a drug on the complete system. In principle this could lead to more and better drugs. This interview outlines some of these concepts which are to be discussed at the forthcoming Bio-IT Conference in Boston, USA see...

Plaque formation in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is seeded by excision products of Amyloid precursor protein (APP) generated by the combined activities of beta and gamma secretases. To reduce the production of these neurotoxic peptides the inhibition of beta-secretase (Beta-site APP Cleaving Enzyme, BACE1, Swiss-Prot P56817) is being intensively pursued as a possible therapy for AD and all drug candidates are screened for selectivity against the paralogue (BACE2, Swiss-Prot Q9Y5Z0) which...

Further details of the book can be found at http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470181052.html and on Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=4H_ai7ivRIcC&pg=PP1&dq=structural+bioin... .

Gregory Rose from PharmExperts.com interviews J. Buccafusco (Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, GA) about his development of new anti-Altzheimer drugs, designed to act by multiple mechanisms to improve congnition. Desensitization of nicotinic receptors is one of the novel approaches proposed by Buccafusco. Three of his compounds are currently in advanced preclinical evaluation.