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Professor Martin Scanlon – Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences

30/05/2024 10:45 am - 30/05/2024 11:45 am
Location
Davis Auditorium / Bundoora Large Boardroom

WEHI ACRF Chemical Biology Seminar hosted by Dr Petar Calic
 

Professor Martin Scanlon

Theme Leader for Medicinal Chemistry, Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS)

 

Navigating the chemical universe

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via TEAMS

Including Q&A session

 

 

Fragment-based drug design (FBDD) has been widely adopted to identify small molecules that bind to biomolecular targets. However, the hit rates observed in fragment screens can be relatively high, and it is common for fragment hits to bind very weakly to their target. In practice, many fragments bind with affinities that cannot be measured accurately – which makes ranking them challenging. Therefore, selecting the “best” fragments to advance into further development is not always trivial.

 

In this presentation I will describe a strategy that we have implemented to provide a more robust and systematic approach to this early phase of FBDD. This workflow employs a combination of chemoinformatic design and biophysical screening approaches to validate and rank fragment hits, and to identify suitable vectors for chemical elaboration. Subsequently, it employs microscale parallel synthesis of targeted libraries that are designed to sample the chemical space around elaboration vectors.

 

More recently, we have implemented the screening of DNA-encoded libraries (DEL) to identify hits as ligands for biomolecular targets. Although very different in concept, FBDD and DEL provide complementary information to aid in navigating the early stages of drug discovery.

 

In this presentation I will outline some of the approaches that we have developed to support early-stage research programs in Medicinal Chemistry.

 

 

 

All welcome!

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