WEHI Postgraduate Seminar Series hosted by the Education Committee
 

Associate Professor Jeff Babon
Laboratory Head –  Structural Biology division, WEHI
 

The rise of fragment-based drug design

Davis Auditorium

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Including Q&A session

Traditional methods for drug discovery involve screening large numbers of compounds, looking for those that bind their targets with medium-affinity and then iteratively optimising them until they are potent enough to be effective in vivo. In the late 1990s, Steve Fesik from Abbott Laboratories  pioneered a different approach in which drugs are built by first identifying "fragments" that bind in adjacent pockets on the target and then linking them together. This seminar will describe the reasoning behind this methodology and its successes and challenges.

Jeff Babon is a graduate of Melbourne University and obtained his PhD at the Murdoch Institute. He undertook postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Medical Research (London, UK) and then returned to Australia in 2003 to take a position in the Structural Biology division at WEHI.

All welcome!